Your Honors: Your decision last week to criminalize the religious rite of circumcision presents a threat to the survival of the German people. Germans are failing of the desire to live. At your present fertility rate of 1.3 children per female, there will be virtually no German speakers left to celebrate Goethe’s quadricentennial, although a few Jewish scholars still might learn German as a supplement to Yiddish. In more ways than you imagine, this decision poisons the hearts of your countrymen and reduces their long-term prospects for survival.

Whether the Constitutional Court will uphold your decision remains to be seen; in the meantime, you have put the life of Germany’s small Jewish community into suspension. Physicians at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin have stopped performing circumcisions for fear of legal action. Even worse: you have provided a pretext for every Jew-hater in Germany to denounce a fundamental practice of our religion on the spurious pretext of child welfare.

Not even the Nazis thought of banning circumcision as a way of uprooting Jewish life in Germany. If your decree withstands a constitutional challenge, Germany once again will be Judenrein. The difference today is that you need us more than we need you.

Never mind that your decision involved the case of Muslim parents circumcising a child for religious reasons. The matter of circumcision comes to the West through the Jews, regardless of the Muslim imitation Jewish practices. This is our issue, and you will answer to us in the court of world opinion.

In danger of extinction: Germans aged 15 to 24 vs over 60, at constant fertility

Source: United Nations World Population Prospects

To suggest that circumcision impairs health is silly on the face of it, considering that the Jewish people, alone among all the peoples of the world, have endured through these past 4,000 years – not in spite of circumcision, but rather because of it, as I shall explain.

The State of Israel, the only country in which almost every male is circumcised, has the world’s highest life expectancy at 82 years (in a tie with Japan and Switzerland). The average Israeli man can expect to live four years longer than the average German man. Israel also has the highest fertility of any industrial country, at three children per female. If the respective fertility rates of Germany and Israel continue, there will be more Israelis under the age of 25 than Germans by the end of the present century.

I will not address the scientific grounds for circumcision (which among other things drastically reduces the transmission of infections including AIDS), because your decree has nothing to do with science. Rather, as Heinrich Heine wrote in 1844 of your city of Cologne,
Dummheit und Bosheit buhlten hier
Gleich Hunden auf freier Gasse;
Die Enkelbrut erkennt man noch heut
An ihrem Judenhasse.
(Stupidity and evil mated here / Like dogs in the open gutter / You still can recognize their descendants today / By their Jew-hatred).

I continue to explain why the immortality of the Jewish people is founded on circumcision. Read the whole essay here.

335 Comments, 84 Threads

1.
An Préachán

Mr. Goldman, you write,

“Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle warned, rather lamely, that a court decision should not impact Germany’s image as a country that promotes religious tolerance. An effort is underway in the Cologne provincial legislature to suppress the court ban by explicitly legalizing religious circumcision. But the popular undercurrent of anti-Semitism may be too powerful for Germany’s benign CDU government to control. The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz, as the joke goes, and the emotional energy which the Cologne case has brought forth betrays a deeper and darker rage in the German public.”

I read this and all I can say is, after John Robert’s idiocy last week, I am now, at least, pretty much able to believe anything.

It seems a bit paranoiac, if perhaps forgivable, of David Goldman to assume an anti-Semitic motive where an anti-Muslim seems more likely, based both on the facts and on German popular attitudes to Muslims today. This might become a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Germans might “forgive the Jews for Auschwitz”, but they are less likely to forgive the Jews for reminding them of Auschwitz.

Also, I’d have liked a bit of a discussion on the difference between tolerating religious beliefs and tolerating religious practices; an abstract discussion, not one focused on circumcision.

but they are less likely to forgive the Jews for reminding them of Auschwitz.

In other words, the Jews owe it to the Germans to shut up on the most traumatic experience in their 3000 year history. Moreover, even if the Jews could police their speech sufficiently to please the Germans, they would continue to remind the Germans of Auschwitz merely by existing. In other words, the Germans will not forgive the Jews for Auschwitz as long as the Jews continue to live.

Or perhaps people who grew up their whole lives being preached to about how horrible they were because of what long dead people did to other long dead people before they were born might have gotten sick and tired of it.

And I’d not blame them. I, for one, am sick to death of being beaten over the head with slavery. I am also sick and tired of paying reparations in the form of Section 8, EBT, subsidized utilities, free cell phones, free meal programs in their schools, and countless other things.

It is telling that the matter at issue was circumcision and not female genital mutilation. Anyone who has seen the videos knows how the young girls suffer during this procedure. And then many suffer for the rest of their lives with urinary and vaginal problems subsequently caused by the procedure. Many human rights activists have been raising concerns for years.

If the issue were truly about anyone’s rights, then FMG would have been the target – not circumcision. I think David Goldman may be right in seeing that the real target of this decision is the Jews.

But what is missing in the report is the repercussions amongst the Muslims.

Miriam, it is also telling that no feminists have said a word about aborting female babies simply because they are female either. Also, you never hear so-called feminists defend women who choose to stay at home to be wives and mothers. Why is that do you suppose? But to the subject at hand, I am totally opposed to circumcision because my first son was circumcised and it was utterly brutal and took forever to heal. My second son was not circumcised but that was my choice based on experience . Government has absolutely no right to interfere in these decisions…especially a gov’t like Germany that is so prone to go insane at the least provocation anyway. Next we’ll be reading that they’re castrating males to prevent aggression, or something equally bizarre.

Germane (forgive me) to this matter is the question: What is the “age of consent” under German law? A Jewish circumcision takes place at 8 days (barring medical complications), but an Islamic one can be as late as 13 years (I understand that any combination of boys whose ages add up to 13 can be circumcised at the same ceremony). It’s entirely possible that this new law can end up making circumcision inconvenient for Muslims, but impossible for Jews. Anyone know?

It’s still required afterwards; at age 13 the responsibility devolves on the child. Imagine if there was a ban. Would not some teenager, studying about the severe divine punishment for being uncircumcised, try to do it himself and, heaven forbid, damage himself?

Well, we could ban teaching Judaism, or maybe burn the Talmud and the Bible.

Most of the press commentaries supporting the circumcision ban respond to the statements of the Central Council of German Jews, not the Muslims, as in the FT item I translated. That is a fact, not paranoia. As for belief vs. practice: read my Asia Times essay (or better yet, read Wyschogrod’s “Body of Faith”). Judaism is a religion of the body first and foremost; it explicitly declines to separate “spiritual” from “carnal.” Belief in Judaism is meaningless without circumcision, kashrut, marital purity laws, Sabbath observance (which is first of all physical: abstention from labor) and so on.

Fair enough; and it is also fair to note that German Jews have a much longer-standing claim to toleration of their practices than German Muslims.

Still:
(a) my comment about the facts of the case and about German popular attitudes, still stands;
(b) if most German commentators responded to Jewish statements, that means they were ignoring Muslim statements, and speaking for myself I’d rather be opposed than ignored.

You appear to believe that people (specifically, Jews and Muslims, but presumably others as well) have the right to circumcise their sons. What about their daughters? What about cutting off the labia and sewing the wound shut, a practice the savages in Egypt apparently think has religious importance? Maybe amputating the left arm? What if Mama says yes, Papa says no?

My point is simply that there may be rights involved here other than those of one parent, and that calling something “religious” does not, or at least should not, place it beyond criticism or reproach.

The comparison is odious, for reasons I have mentioned earlier: medical opinion is split between proponents and opponents of circumcision, and the practice has sustained the healthiest and most successful people on earth for thousands of years. Female genital mutilation has nothing to do with the issue: it has no sacramental role whatever in Islam (which tolerates it but does not require it), and there is not a medical authority who considers it anything but harmful. This is obvious: the question itself is malicious and dishonest, and by extension, the questioner. Shame on you.

The similarity is so obvious that female genital mutilation is often termed “circumcision”, even though it is no such thing. I see that being accused of defending genital mutilation offends you deeply. Nonetheless, what you are defending is the practice of mutilating the genitals of children. It is conceivable that the practice can be defended on medical grounds, but the burden of proof lies upon the defender. There are many cases where children have suffered severe harm and even died as a result of complications from circumcision. The same could be said of vaccination. But the benefits of circumcision are nowhere near as evident as those of vaccination. The morality of imposing the procedure on someone who is not capable of consent is deeply problematic.

Mr. Goldman, you have condemned in strong terms the widespread belief among Muslim men that God approves when they take a stick to their wives, but you appear to have no problem when they take a knife to their sons. I will allow there may be a degree of malice in my pointing this out, but calling me dishonest merely shows that the truth hurts.

This is not the first time circumcision was banned. The ancient Romans banned it on occasion, and Jews sacrificed their lives to perform it. Could you imagine the danger of driving the practice underground?

I wonder if one reason why anti-semitic measures are passed without comment is sheer ignorance. The Dutch ban on Kosher slaughter is ridiculous once on knows how rapid blood loss causes shock. If the arguments of the Germans are anything akin to those of US anti-circumcision activists, then they know nothing about the medical aspect either.

That could either be due to studious ignorance or genuine laziness and compliance. I remain mystified why the US activists, at least, argue that an intact foreskin is a human rights issue.

Ever since I heard about the Cologne court decision, I was waiting for this essay.

I guess Herr Matthias Ruch did not do the research about the people pushing the ban in San Francisco. One of the most prominent published antisemitic cartoons showing a devious looking mohel that could been straight out of “Der ewige Jude”.

As a circumcised gentile, my first response was “huh?” who cares? When the crazies in SF were parading this idea around I relegated it to ‘It’s SF, so of course it’s looney’.
Then this.
A question…I will assume that most practicing Jews will continue with their G-d ordered practice…Rabbis will relearn the skill…but the rest of the world my cave in…now Jews are easier to identify…are they not? Much easier than David’s star sewn on the clothing.
And execution chambers are so much more sophisticated.

Jew, be afraid.
Gentile, be more afraid, for we are next and less attuned to atrocity.

As a Gentile (a Gentile who BELIEVES that Jews are God’s Chosen people with the unbreakable covenant) I’ve been afraid for awhile now. The worldwide swing to an in-your-face anti-semitism (anti-zionism is a lie and an excuse for Jew hatred) has been terrifying for me. I will NEVER understand this antagonism.

To me Jews are kind of like the canary in the coal mine for when the world is about to go insane.

Indeed. Besides which, those who forbid Jewish parents from circumcising their sons on the pretext of health concerns will soon drop the pretext and forbid Christians from baptizing their children and teaching them their faith.

Religious Jews generally do not use doctors to circumcise their sons; we use trained circumcisers (mohalim), and in the States, it is generally done in the Synagogue (even on the Sabbath, even on Yom Kippur) after the morning service. The standard medical method appears to me to be barbaric in comparison. I have seen our expert back in Baltimore; he was so fast you could not even see it.

If it is not done at eight days, it is still required; at age 13 the responsibility move from the father to the boy himself. One could imagine the danger of a ban that would drive the practice underground.

Christianity was considered a sect of Judaism for 50 years until the Pharisees expelled the Christians from the synagogues. The correct understanding of Christianity is Judaism without limitations. Whereas Judaism used many symbols since antiquity, Jesus of Nazareth revealed the underlying realities behind those symbols, replacing the earthly copies with the heavenly realities. No more would ritual cleansing and sacrifices have to be repeated because we now have access to the one perfect Washing and the one perfect Sacrifice.

I invite you to come to a Catholic Church this Sunday and simply observe what is going on. Participate in the prayers or don’t, that is your call, but simply be respectful, just don’t present yourself for Communion, for it would be a grave sin for an unbaptized person to eat Christ’s Flesh and drink His Blood, and it would be a grave lie if you received the Same without believing Them to be the Flesh and Blood of Christ.

We begin by singing while we carry in the crucifix and the Book of the Gospels, and then we pray for God’s mercy and sing His praises. Next comes a reading from either the Torah, the Prophets or the Writings, or from one of the seven books of the Septuagint that we regard as canonical but the Jews do not. After the reading, we reply with one of the Psalms, followed by a reading from a New Testament Epistle. Then, we sing the Alleluia, and then the priest or deacon reads the Gospel. These readings are on a three-year rotation, and at certain parts of the year, we depart from this norm (for instance, during Paschaltide we read from Acts of the Apostles instead of Tanach, and in the third year as well as on two holidays, we read from the Book of Revelation, and on Palm Sunday, there are two Gospel readings instead of one). The priest or deacon then gives a sermon, which is usually related to the readings, but can be on another topic entirely if he deems it necessary. After this, we baptize any children being presented for baptism (adults seeking baptism are baptized at the Vigil of the Resurrection of the Lord). If there are no children to be baptized, we instead profess our faith by reciting our creed. We then pray for various intentions, always ending with a prayer for the healing of the sick and the repose of the dead.

After this, we sing another hymn while we take up a collection to fund the upkeep of the church as well as works of charity and other ministries. These monetary gifts are presented to the priest along with our gifts of bread and wine. The priest then recites the prayer of blessing over the gifts, which you will recognize as being derived from the Jewish prayer before meals. The congregation replies praying for God to accept this sacrifice for His praise and for our good. We then sing God’s praises in the Sanctus. The priest then recounts the Last Supper, and then, speaking Christ’s words, holds up the bread and proclaims, “This is My Body,” and likewise with the chalice, “This is the chalice of My Blood,” at which point we proclaim that the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ. We then profess the death and resurrection of the Lord. After the prayer of Thanksgiving concludes, we pray the Lord’s Prayer, and then we wish peace upon one another, often using handshakes, hugs, or even kisses. The priest then invites the congregation to Communion, and the congregation and the priest together declare their unworthiness and profess the faith that God can heal their souls. Communion is then distributed to those present who wish to receive, and some extra is kept to be taken to the sick. After Communion, the priest says a short prayer, and any announcements about upcoming events are given at this time. The priest then blesses the congregation and dismisses them.

John Paul II of blessed memory and Benedict XVI acknowledge the Election of Israel and the permanence of God’s Covenant with Israel, which is a covenant of the flesh. It is also forbidden for us to participate in Christian worship, although we embrace our Christian brothers and sisters as friends and allies in the search for the sacred and the defense of the good. Neither Benedict nor John Paul asked us to come to Mass. I respectfully decline your invitation.

This sounds like the Kabbalah Center (before that charlatan Berg took them over), the belief that you can have the spirit without the letter (in the original Christian meanings of those terms). A fallacy, from the Jewish viewpoint.

Maybe Germany sees it as killing 2 birds with one stone. I can’t see Jews or Muslims putting up with it – they’ll simply do it in private and drive up the risk of complications. The same argument the Left uses about legalizing abortions. Germany for Germans? What’s a German? I guess we’ll find out.

I see storm clouds on the European horizon. But when you have 750 Muslim no-go zones in neighboring France, that’s going to happen. Reasonable immigration is one thing, but when it’s stuck in a country’s face and not controlled because of mindless political correctness, it enables radicals. Jews may simply be in the way of the Muslims Germany is trying to get at.

Fail Burton. I doubt 100k German Jews are ‘In the way’ of anything in Germany. I would more likely believe that some islamic (lower case intended) group or another is setting up a straw man hoping for residual anti-semitism in Germany.
In a weird sort of way an islamist could rationalize that rising anti-Jewish feeling in Europe could be used to segue pro-islam feeling. (As a poster above noted, the muslim community will simply ignore the rulings and dare anyone to even look, much less interfere).
As David has oft mentioned, islam is in demographic decline, everywhere but Europe.
What no one, including David has noted, is that the muslim enclaves in the Eurozone are not monolithic. When the parasites take over the hosts, they will begin again a cycle of European warfare, islam vs islam, with much more zeal and power than ever before.

Europe needs to grow a set, circumcized or not.
And we need to keep our powder dry.

I meant accidental and irrelevant targets. Like Jews or not, no one in Germany sees them as a threat. It’s not Jews agitating and burning neighborhoods down in France, committing rapes and crimes out of proportion to their numbers and generally never shutting up. What Germany should do next is outlaw Islam like they’ve outlawed Nazism – same animal. What would the Eurozone do if Germany made that case? Ha, ha. I’d love to see it made.

Islam is being given enough rope to hang itself, and ironically by the very political correctness that has protected it so far. The black Left in America has also overreached to the point where it’s racism is simply assumed and blatant. Neither group even tries to hide their bigotry and in fact defends it. I hope there is a price to pay down the line within our own polities because I am sick to death of the double standard. Did we outlaw institutional racism only to have it pop up in our midst and imported too?

M. Michael.
“? German thinking: If we couch our anti-muslim actions by making them seem anti-Jewish, perhaps not only the German population, but also our muslim targets, may better go along with them . . .”

I’m having a hard time with this. My very limited acquaintance with actual native Germans gives me pause. Yes some, privately, still harbor an anti-semitic core, are so sensitive about it that the convoluted thought you suggest seems hard to swallow. On the other hand my again limited exposure to European thought (including a Belgian daughter in law) suggests that the gloves are about to come off in response to islamic immigrants.

When the financial excrement hits the rotating blades of the ventilation system I suspect political correctness will be one of the first things to go.
ta

No-one thought this one out conspiratorially. Things don’t work that way in Germany (or any place outside the former Communist countries and the Arab world). Anti-religious sentiment is in the air along with anti-Semitism in Germany — the papers are full of reports of the decline of Christian life — and this provincial court felt emboldened to attack a core religious practice on “rational” grounds, eliciting a flood of sewage from like-minded miscreants in the media.

Could be, I don’t know. But one things for sure, there is an anti-immigrant sentiment growing in Europe and I don’t blame them one bit. It’s all very good to say everyone’s equal and quite another thing to try and wrangle Third World failure into some kind of reality.

Let’s face it: reality doesn’t need a boost. The East India Company went into India and took over the place though outnumbered by millions. Europe’s immigrants have made no impact whatsoever except in the conspicuous negative. They can blame racism but that’s going to get old, and has. The Hindus and Muslims who ran India had plenty of cultural and racial disdain for the English and in the end that didn’t stop the English, and it shouldn’t stop Europe’s “bright” new immigrants.

It’s one thing to welcome immigrants, but to allow it to overwhelm a society by bringing in too many in a short time creates intolerance because when many come they huddle in enclaves rather than assimilate. The English huddled in enclaves in India and succeeded – that’s the crucial difference. If a man can do a thing, he will – no need to write Marxist essays on why they don’t.

Honestly, only PC is holding back the stormclouds in Europe right now. People are tired of sharing and being kicked in the hind end for it. The economies of Europe are tanking and eventually they’ll understand why – a boat can only have so many anchors before it will sink in a storm.

750 no-go zones in France – put on a gov’t website and taken down because of PC. That’s like saying you want to fight cancer but are not allowed to diagnose it. Enjoy your sultanates in 100 years.

I’ve not said anything about jihadists. I’m talking about crime and political subversion and agitation. Sure, most Muslims want to live in peace. But compared to who? Well, it turns out even more non-Muslims want to live in peace. You’re talking PC, and PC is designed to rob an event of context, so everyone is equal in all ways and right and wrong smeared evenly to prove some moronic political point.

“To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen” – Plotinus

I hope you don’t live in Paris, because that’s where those 750 no-go zones Fail Burton is talking about are – they have completely surrounded the city. When they choose they can starve you out or they can burn you alive.

No muslim wants to live in peace – they are all on their own private jihad and they are using their numbers to crush your culture. They will only live in peace once you are all dead and they can dance on your graves.

Maybe I was less than clear. I was suggesting that the target was Muslims, but by making it seem like it was targeting Jews primarily(by playing up the Jewish, as opposed to Muslim, objections), the Germans felt that the Muslims were more likely to not raise a stink, because it was the hated Jews voicing the most reaction.

It was easy for the Germans to do this, however, because the Jews are hated, or not loved, by just about everyone, Merkel, Benedict, and a smattering of official Germans and decent folk notwithstanding.

“It was easy for the Germans to do this, however, because the Jews are hated, or not loved, by just about everyone, Merkel, Benedict, and a smattering of official Germans and decent folk notwithstanding.”

What do you base that on? Close, recent, and ongoing contact with contemporary Germany? Or the attitudes that you’ve seen portrayed in Nazi era documentaries and movies?

It’s my impression that post-WWII Germany has made unstinting efforts to root out anti-Semitism and do everything in its power to turn away from the Jew-hatred that engulfed it under Hitler. They paid billions of marks in compensation to Israel in the postwar years, even at times when Germany was mostly rubble and the money was sorely needed for reconstruction. I’ve seen remarks on Israeli government websites attesting to their close relationship with postwar West Germany. Michael Ledeen, who is Jewish and had extensive contact with Germans in the years since WW II, told an anecdote just the other day about how all the Germans he met were extremely apologetic about what had been done to the Jews by their parents generation; in fact, he said they wouldn’t shut up about it even after he assured them that he wasn’t blaming the younger generation.

German friends of the Jews are visble and outspoken, but a distinct minority. Haters of Jews are everywhere, and mostly silent. They do however give backing to ‘pro palestinian’ and anti-zionist elements.

I think it has more to do with cowards afraid to confront Muslims, and so like Larry ODonnell who is unafraid of denigrating Mormons and their faith, but would never act similarly with regards to Muslims and Islam, the argument is with Jews, who arent likely to show up at your doorstep with an axe or a bomb…when you piss them off.

It is the Left and Center that play this cowards game mostly. Anybody willing to confront Muslims directly is labelled a Far Right Fascist and refused protection by the state (from Muslim violence).

But alas…

The conflicts are going to come to a head, because the pollies wont deal with it, because they would be blasted by the Left which has marched through the insitutions, especially media and academia. Eventually, the damn will burst though…instead of a reasoned orderly series of policies brought about by open discussion of the hard truth, we are going to see street justice and vigilantism and lawlessness, because the system is failing to work/paralyzed.

Of course the Left wont be looking for root causes of this violence emanating from European Christian populations, they will be condemning them as fascists.

There’s a huge difference between removing skin and mutilating the clitoris. If you think this is so terrible you should certainly also outlaw piercing of any kind for minors, including the old age and very common practice of piercing one’s ears for earings. Piercing also doesn’t have any kind of medical value, while removing the foreskin does, so if anything piercing should be outlawed first. Female circumcision is in a different category all together. Mutilating the clitoris has a severe and irreversible impact on a woman’s ability to enjoy sex. If she doesn’t find her G spot she will never experience an orgasm.

Bullet train huh! I watched a recent video of a train in France doing 357.7 or so MPH!!! all this on relatively narrow gage track and a vehicle with a pretty high center of gravity! WTF are these people thinking?? Imagine the carnage if the muslims blow it off the track and they are surely thinking of things like that as I am.

I am German and the court rule for me came as a total surprise. There had not been any real “movement” or debate about it (as far as I know) and I am ashamed and shocked about the majority of reactions even at my favored websites, sites I thought being pro Jewish and anti totalitarian. What a shame.
There is a really strong and growing and always angry anti religious movement, though most times anti catholic and of corse the badly hidden anti-Semitism of the anti- Israel movement fed by the main stream media and happily adopted from my fellow countrymen. Yes, your analysis is right, the (or so depressing many) Germans will never forget the Jews for Auschwitz and they are obviously too dumb to know their cultural roots or natural allies. A people without soul will die – Germany and Europe will die.Bath Ye ór anticipated the developement. May God help us coming through the times ahead. May God save Israel.
Thank you for sharing your always impressing thoughts.

JeanJean,
Thanks for writing, and you make your point eloquently. Germans rank among some of the closest and most important friends of the Jewish people — Benedict XVI and Chancellor Merkel are the first who come to mind. It is depressing, but it is also an opportunity to fight over the right issues.

He just said that Americans, when viewed in the aggregate, are friends of the Jews and maybe also Italians, so your assertion that “it would be impossible to meet [his] conditions for friendship” is obviously false, which makes your “explanation” redundant. It would be rather rational for a Jew to think that the Germans aren’t great friends of the Jews because, well, they aren’t.

Merkel and Benedict are not exceptions. They are in the minority where the Jews are concerned (and it is a big minority), but they are so influential that they often push the majority in the right direction.

It is an anthropological impossibility to remove the sacred from life. All human culture has the basic structure of centre and periphery, a focus of shared (explicitly or implicitly sacralized) attention and a desiring margin. I’d say Judaism recognizes this precisely in its unwillingness to separate the carnal and the spiritual. So, I think we should ask what form of the sacred is taken by German “secularization” (which we should understand as de-ritualization not de-sacralization in all forms). In the judge’s willingness to see the circumcised infant as a victim of his parents and doctors, he is advancing a form of white guilt – the child has been marked by authority with some kind of victim status (notwithstanding that his father is presumably so marked too).

If Germany is dieing, it is because like much of the West it is trapped in guilt and its consequent sacralization, for the purpose of “redeeming”, the “victims” of all professional authority is not saving it. Germans need to ask why this is. When you reduce all of human interaction to the “Nazi/Jew” paradigm, you stop affirming life in many of its necessary aspects. This decision is not simply an attack on the Jews or Muslims (in the role of naz-ty patriarchs), it is an attack on the necessity of human freedom, responsibility, and authority exercised in the name, not of redeeming the “victim,” but of other forms of the sacred.

I’ve never gotten that “white guilt” thing. I’m supposed to feel guilty because Western Civilization is successful….because? I don’t particularly care that the third world is unsuccessful. It’s not like we kept our technology secret. It’s not like the west didn’t attempt (and are attempting still) to elevate their education and standard of living. Any continent the old colonizers were on are still rich in resources – they weren’t strip mined. So, sorry…..I feel no guilt because you are too lame to get your act together.

If an Israeli Embassy has the bandwidth to intervene and stop a yahoo such as Omar Faris from speaking at a high school then an Israeli Embassy certainly will have more bandwidth to reverse this court decision.

Kashrut banned in Demark, Brit mila banned in Germany, kipot “discouraged” in France. All this does is accelerate the elimination fo the Jewish community from Europe. These Jews have read the writing on the wall and learning all about immigration law. To Israel, To Canada,To Australia, To the USA. As the Europeans erode the foundations of their culture and return to neopagan self gratification , I will not mourn their loss. I can only hope that the last sons of Martel and Bodieca destroy their nuclear arsenals before turning over their countries to the Muslims.

Kippot are discouraged because Jews in Europe who wear it will get the sh*t beat out of them by the Muslims that Europe pretends to hate so much but really loves, since they will drive out the remaining Jews.

There’s the law re wearing ostensible religious signs in public institutions whose real target was the veil. But years before that a French president (can’t remember who) adviced the Jews to avoid wearing conspicuous Jewish items that would make them easily recognizable as Jews as a way to avoid harassment and attacks in the streets (by Muslims). France has the largest Jewish community in Europe and also the largest Muslim community, but thousands of Jews leave every year. The size of the community is between 250,000 and 500,000 people (there’s no official census), so if in every decade a minimum of 20,000 Jews emigrate it’s about 5% of the Jewish population, which qualifies as a Jewish flight. If Muslim immigration continues the numbers are highly likely to grow. The irony is that about half of French Jews are people who were expelled or fled from North Africa in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and their descendants. Now the Muslims are practically driving them out from France as well.

here’s the law re wearing ostensible religious signs in public institutions whose real target wa s the veil. But years before that a French president (can’t remember who) adviced the Jews to avoid wearing conspicuous Jewish items that would make them easily recognizable as Jews as a way to avoid harassment and attacks in the streets (by Muslims).

“France has the largest Jewish community in Europe and also the largest Muslim community, but thousands of Jews leave every year.”

really, then there wouldn’t be anymore Jews in France, too bad most of them are in our elite, and don’t intend to move to Israel, where their security wouldn’t be better insured, and because they aren’t bigot religious, but laic, also french citizens since the Revolution.

It was Sharon aggressive policy for repopulating Israel (hey the arabs are more prolific) that sent recruitment agents in France, spreading paranoia among the french Jews, some left, but were disappointed, they couldn’t find a situation equivaling what they had in France, or didn’t find a job at all, so half came back, or emigrated to the US, Canada, Australia…

“The size of the community is between 250,000 and 500,000 people (there’s no official census)”

actually 600.000 ~2005″

so if in every decade a minimum of 20,000 Jews emigrate it’s about 5% of the Jewish population, which qualifies as a Jewish flight.”

Muslim immigration is stopped since the Pasqua law (a decade and a half ago), but not when illegals hit the territory, though if they haven’t a political asile motivation they are sent back.

“The irony is that about half of French Jews are people who were expelled or fled from North Africa in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and their descendants. Now the Muslims are practically driving them out from France as well.”

Yet they are the “religious” ones, who have no specific ties with France, or as a far away country, but they weren’t expelled, they who decided to leave Algeria, most of them hadn’t grief with the Muslims, nor FLN, not even with the Maghrebin in France, it’s since the Israelo-palestinian conflict (particularly the intifada) that the both communities disagreed. Though it seems that the imans and the rabbi are trying to find some common sense, both condamn aggression on whatever population in France

We all know, except for that French in denial, that people don’t spend their lives at schools or officialdom offices. And Jews are attacked at both schools and outside them in Europe, of which France is part.
In 21st century France, Jews are not officially counted but there’s no need to wear distinctive signs to get attacked because one is Jewish, as the murders of Ilan Halimi and “D.J.” Sellam clearly show. After several years of negating the evidence, French authorities ended-up recognizing their soil is infected with Jew-hatred. Statistics are very clear about it.
It appears that most attacks are the œuvre of Mohammedans, but they have quite a few useful infidels, like the delirious one above, who whitewash their hate crimes.

Most of the attacks and threats on Jews are not perpetrated by neo-Nazis, rabid Christians or Hindus, or even leftists, so it really doesn’t matter how sympathetic or not is the non-Muslim population. It depends more on the size of the Muslim population (highest in France) and the concentration of radical elements (high in the UK, for instnace). The two European countries with the highest levels of Jewish emigration in absolute numbers (haven’t checked in terms of the percentage of the Jewish population) are France and the UK, in this order (thousands from France, at least hundreds from the UK every year). To me the numbers say it all. I didn’t say they immigrate to Israel – they may be immigrating to the US, Australia or New Zealand, but they leave France. Why?

Your claim that it’s a result of some sinister Zionist plot is in line with the Muslim accusations that complaints by and emigration of Christians from Muslim majority countries are a result of Zionist libels and really everything is great for Christians in Muslim countries. It’s no secret that Israel wants Jews to come to Israel, but Israel doesn’t and also can’t create fear and paranoia where no cause for it exists. Sharon was responding to the existing situation and growing fears. There’s a pretty succesful non-governmental organization working to encourage and facilitate aliya by North American Jews, helping them to cut the bureaucracy and find work and housing faster, and it’s been getting many requests from all over Europe to open branches for them, so don’t tell me there isn’t a problem and it’s all just a sinister Zionist conspiracy.

Also the way you refer to North African Jews as non integrating religious bigots is problematic. Ilan Halimi and the Jewish DJ murdered by Muslims were both North African Jews – one was a popular DJ and the other was seduced by a Muslim girl to meet her for a date and was then kidnapped by her partners, so where is their non-integration and bigotry? There are many North-African Jews in the French academy, including several well known philosophers and authors, in the entertainment industry, in science and technology and elsewhere. There are no Jewish no-go zones. Jews don’t harass, attack or murder Muslims or Christians for being Muslim or Christian. Many Jews are harassed and attacked for being Jews, and several were murdered (by Muslims) for being Jews, including the recent attack in Toulouse (and as for how many such murders took place elsewhere in the world in the last 15 years – they’re more frequent in Yemen than in France, even though there are only a few hundred Jews left there, but as far as I know the number in the US, Australia, Britain and the Netherlands is zero). If you think it isn’t scary, try to imagine yourself in their shoes. You just blame the victims because the idea that there might be a problem offends your French patriotism.

And yes, Jews were expelled from certain Arab countries and fled others due to violence. Of course, some immigrated to France because they wanted to and not because they had to leave, but you should really research the subject of the Jewish refugees from Muslim countries before speaking so decisively on the matter. The Jews were almost completely eradicated from the Middle East where in many places Jews predated the Muslim conquest.

Your attitude to Israel is similarly tainted by misconception and bigotry. But then you’re French, so I don’t expect any better. I’ve learned the best way to deal with it is not to expect anything. If I get anything remotely resembling fairness from a French person or any other European I’m pleasantly surprised. Otherwise, it’s just the way of the world. Maybe the French media propaganda about Israel isn’t much better than the Evil Zionist Propaganda about France.

And BTW, Israel does end up with a lot of French Jews, in spite of your belief that life is just horrible here and that Israel commits crimes against Jews. I checked the hard cold data on the website of the immigration department. About 2000 Jews move from France to Israel every year. For a couple of years after the Halimi very grusome torture and murder the numbers were siginificantly higher. And as I said, the other European country where there’s a growing trend is the UK. It grew from just a few a year to hundreds, perhaps because the aliya organization I mentioned before started accepting also British requests (they have a language and resources problem with other European countries). The other significant numbers, except for Russia and Ethiopia, are about 3,000 a year from Latin America and similar numbers from North America, but the difference, of course, is that the Jewish population in the US numbers 5.5 million people, which is a different order of magnitude from any European country, so in terms of percentage it isn’t large, and there are also many more Israelis who immigrate to the US than Israelis who immigrate to France these days (no doubt as a result of a Zionist fear-mongering campaign that for some reason targets France rather than the US, where the majority of non-Israeli Jews live. But everyone knows the cunning Zionists are stupid and crazy and just can’t do the mathematics, so this explains why Sharon spoke of France and not the US. Nothing to do with what’s actually happening in France).

“Also the way you refer to North African Jews as non integrating religious bigots is problematic. Ilan Halimi and the Jewish DJ murdered by Muslims were both North African Jews – one was a popular DJ and the other was seduced by a Muslim girl to meet her for a date and was then kidnapped by her partners, so where is their non-integration and bigotry?”

you are making assertions that I didn’t, never said that North African Jews had difficulties to integrate because they were religious, but that they are for some part more religious than the Askhenasi, that tradition prevails more by them, it’s also true for people living in southern Europe,the Mediterranean club. I said because these French Jews lived in Algeria, had not the same feeling of belonging to the nation/state of France as the Jews living in France since centuries, so it’s easier for them to forecast immigration elsewhere where they can start a new life.

Escuse-me the gang that murdered Halimi wasn’t north-African, but a heteroclit suburb gang with a Ivorian as a leader in which different ethnical people participated (some Europeans were part of it). His murder was primary because he was supposed to be rich, and because simpleminded Africans think that the Jews are the Richs, the former vicims of this gang were normal French.

“There are no Jewish no-go zones.”

like they also are no White men zone !

“including the recent attack in Toulouse”

Toulouse attack was first a attack against France, and the symbol of France: its army (2 muslim soldiers were killed, and a catholic), second, against Jews, part of the islamists remnent anger

“You just blame the victims because the idea that there might be a problem offends your French patriotism.”

BS, also one more of your extrapolations, and about the Jews, that left muslims countries, so far we were talking of the french jews that left Algeria for France, not of the whole ME, again you are extrapoling !

“Your attitude to Israel is similarly tainted by misconception and bigotry. But then you’re French, so I don’t expect any better.”

typish BS, like if the French are responsible for the world disorders !

But you do entertain hate towards the French, I wonder why, oh yes, I do, since Bush said “berate the Germans, punish the French” for not blindly following the neocons’ campains.

The French medias don’t talk much of Israel, nor of any foreign country, apart of the EU’s main members, Germany, Italy, Spain, Britain.

“And BTW, Israel does end up with a lot of French Jews, in spite of your belief that life is just horrible here and that Israel commits crimes against Jews.”

LMAO, Israel, like any country has its percentage of criminals, sorry, it’s human nature, ah, but may-be not the Jews of your book.

” About 2000 Jews move from France to Israel every year.”

yeah during the Sharon’s years, but today?

Most of the French Jews that go to Israel are actually elders that ought a appartment in Tel Aviv, as their 2nd residence, like some would buy a appartment in south of France and or on the Spanish Riviera.

There are more young French that immigrate than french Jews, if you were to make stats, it would be 10 % vs 1%

“there are also many more Israelis who immigrate to the US than Israelis who immigrate to France these days (no doubt as a result of a Zionist fear-mongering campaign that for some reason targets France rather than the US, where the majority of non-Israeli Jews live.”

the reason? language barrier, Israeli rather speaks english. There’s no anti-Israel campain in France, like you would like, but there’s cerainly a anti-French campain among the people of your sort, not the average Israeli of course, that are like every average populations, peace-lovings.

I’ve noticed your English has improved somewhat over the years of posting comments here. Unfortunately, understanding the content of what you’ve written has only made me realize how offensive your posts actually are. You uphold every conceivable negative stereotype I’ve ever hear regarding the French. Sigh.

“Jews must defend the religious freedom of Muslims on matters such as circumcision without conceding (for example) the application of Sharia in family law”.

Commenters seem not to have bitten on the above which, IMHO, is the intriguing center of the essay. I think this is a difficult point to advocate for and also to apply in jurisprudence. People prefer bright-lines: “if it’s Muslim it must be evil-warlike/good-peaceful(depends who is posting)”.

A woman summarized circumcision best to me. It might not matter much to a man, but to a woman, it takes away the only part of a penis that cannot be easily emulated by a cheap piece of Taiwanese plastic. That says it all, as far as the science goes. Germany has every right to pick science over religion in this particular case, without being unfairly accused of Nazi like bigotry.

It’s also not Jewish at all. Much as Muslims must deal with existential evidence against their faith, Jews must recognize that circumcision has its origin in Africa, and all realistic evidence shows it came to the Levant from Egypt.

So science to you is some woman who prefers uncircumcised men? What if there are women who prefer circumcised men? I happen to think it’s more aesthetic (not to mention far cleaner) and not less enjoyable, which is just as “scientific” as the other woman’s opinion. So maybe we should make circumcision mandatory by law because I prefer it this way and that settles the science?

How many German women have had sex with sufficient circumsized and uncircumcized men to be able to generalize? And why are llesbians willing to dispense with the foreskin and the rest of the penis? It seems like there is more to satisfaction than anatomy.

Nothing stops anyone from undergoing circumcision at an age when they can make a rational decision for themselves.

And rather than viewing this decision ‘anti-jew’ or ‘anti-muslim’, many people think it’s simply a ‘pro-baby boy’ decision that protects their human rights as guaranteed by the German constitution, where freedom of Religion is a lesser right than the human right to physical integrity.

As a last resort, if the circumcision of infants is so important for you and you don’t like the culture and the people in Germany, move elsewhere where you can celebrate your personal culture as you please.

You are correct. If the prevailing culture in a country tries to restrict and ban your religious practices, you should leave to a more acommadating culture. However, if you have to leave, the place you are leaving cannot proclaim itself to be a pluralistic, tolerant and inclusive society. To do so is sheer hypocracy.

Female ‘circumcision’ is a different beast entirely. It varies from a small nick in the labia to outright castration of the clitoris and removal of the labia, depending on the cultural barbarity of the practitioner/group. It should be illegal.

Regarding the origins of their various ritual practices, Jews don’t argue that they all originated with them. The point is that Judaism places them in a framework which utilizes them to cultivate morality and holiness.

Regarding the experience of penis penetration, I’ll leave that to you and your resources.

Why not keep the original Jewish “framework” without the adopted act itself, and leave aside any potential health or political risks? It wouldn’t be the first time a compromise is made, between ancient laws and modern reality.

1. People who do not wash have many other, more serious health problem that smegma. And if you want to cut foreskins just in case someone doesn’t wash, why not go the whole hog and demand that everyone has their teeth pulled because some people do not brush and get gum disease? And just imaging the number of accidents that can be avoided if everyone shaves their heads! And whilst we’re at it, if we amputate fingertips and tongues at birth, people will no longer be able to troll on the interwebs…

2. Yes, most women who had experience with both options prefer penii with foreskins because they (ahem) glide smoothly, instead of being reduced to a rigid stabby, scarred stick that is both non-sensitive and painfully fragile in quite a few unlucky victims.

Teeth have an obvious benefit to one’s life and health. Penile foreskins do not. And the proof of it is that anti-circ people are constantly having to try and explain the harm done to those of us who were circumcised as infants. (I was born to a protestant American family at a time when nearly all protestant babies in America were routinely circumcised in the hospital just after birth.)

The majority of American newborns still are circumcised. The German decision implies that an American couple temporarily resident in Germany that has a newborn boy circumcised according to American medical standards would face criminal charges.

Any woman that is a Christian places much importance on circumcised or not. My God said that all men must be circumcised or plainly don’t have intercourse with him. My mother was raised this way, as was me and my sisters, as well as our daughters were.
Unless a man is circumcised, I am not interested. (and yes, I did ask before I married)
Just because the law says they can’t, doesn’t mean they won’t be done. Jew’s, and other Christians, will follow God’s word no matter what. All this does is give the baby a slightly more chance at problems when it’s done.

‘Why not keep the original Jewish “framework” without the adopted act itself, and leave aside any potential health or political risks? It wouldn’t be the first time a compromise is made, between ancient laws and modern reality.’

I think that’s a great question.

I would say that traditional Judaism is based on a belief that Gd intended man to be a soul in a physical body acting in and being affected by the physical world. DPG addresses this point further in his companion AT piece. Rabbi A. Twerski brings down from the Jewish sages that the Divine statement, “lets us make man (Genesis 1:26)” on the sixth day of creation was addressed to the animals, indicating that man would uniquely combine the divine spark with the animal (physical).

Other religions have other POVs and one could argue that the “liberal” streams of Judaism have moved significantly in the direction of disengaging with physical/ritual commandments, but a Judaism that is not entwined w/the physical world would not be traditional Judaism. Traditional Judaism has a pretty good track record, having seen off everyone from the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians to the Nazis and, IMHO, serving as “a light onto nations” w/respect to morality and, as DPG has written, producing a relatively happy and healthy society, so I’d say the system has worked well.

Health concerns – answered above and in AT.

Political Risk – Jews persisted in circumcision in the face of enemies such as the Greek phalanx and Roman legion in classical times so I’m not too worried about the objections of anti-circumcision advocates from 21st century San Francisco.

As a circumcised Jewish German I fully support the ban on the Male Genital Mutilation aka “Male Circumcision”. The synagogues in Germany host on Shabbats and on holidays thousands of praying Jews who kept their prepuces, and G_d accepts and respects them as much as the others.

It’s time to put apart the obscurantism the circumcision obligation represents and start living in present times.
Circumcision is one of the oldest forms of child abuse in Jewry and needs to be banned.

I guess your definition of child abuse differs from mine. Strapping on a bomb and using your child as a human grenade would be my definition of child abuse. Removing the foreskin of an 8-day old baby while under the supervision of a professional and experienced mohel, is not.

As a circumcised protestant male myself, I have no idea what you are talking about when you describe it as “child abuse”. (I had it done to me as an new-born infant at the hospital.) If you go and claim that my rights were violated because I didn’t give my consent, I can tell you many other ways my rights must have been violated: My parents sent me to a nursery school of their choice without consulting me –didn’t even ask my opinion of the place! My parents forced me to go to someone called an “orthodontist” and forced me to undergo a painful procedure supposedly for the good of my health –again without my consent! They forced me to brush my teeth, told me when to get up and go to bed, forced me to do chores (slave labor!), all supposedly for my own benefit! They could have sent me to Sunday school and indoctrinated me against my will!

Of course, if someone had determined that my parents were actually harming me, they could have called the authorities and put a stop to it. The problem with you ant-circ folk is that you have failed (but not through the lack of trying) to show that circumcision is any harm at all. I would think that that should be a requirement to its criminalization.

You may say that cutting off a part of the body without obvious medical justification constitutes harm; but did you know that for a while (the early 20th century), in America, tonsillectomies were a nearly ROUTINE procedure for kids as a measure to promote general good health? They don’t seem to think that there is much benefit in doing it so routinely today, but was it actually something harmful?

What benefit is there to driving this activity (infant male circumcision) underground? That’s all legal banning will accomplish.

since we have movies where nazis ask men to drop trou, to find out what their parents raised them as…..it sounds pretty anti- jewish to me.

I would never, ever trust anyone from san francisco on a single health matter. there is a new history of the city where the good point is that gay activists get anti-retroviral drugs- not that they don’t get HIV in the first place. Or, say, Susie Bright, who comments how everyone she knows has herpes, and that it’s no big deal. For everyone out of that city? It’s a big deal. The notion of not getting a social disease by, say, waiting until marriage and a honeymoon? never comes up as an option.

my kids are circumsized. my sister is jewish, and we are lutheran. I never wanted my kids to even think about a divide between them and their cousins. and, well, all the anti-circumcision lit talks about “daily bathing.” which is great, if you are a peasant or a mama’s boy who never leaves home and showers daily. I wanted boys equipped to go walk into a jungle and come out six months later, all parts intact. the us military has stories about guys going off on patrol, or into a trench, and the end parts falling off. I don’t know if it’s true, or if it’s like the story of the guy with the hook at the lover’s lane on the local lake, but it’s certainly memorable.

And, while I’m talking about it- on female circumcision: it’s from egypt- a place that highly valued cleanliness- to the point that there’s literature about priests figuring out enemas from storks- ewww. It was a rainy, lush, swamp. Most femininist medical literature stated that florid yeast infections were the usual state for women in summer- not just “mild discharge”- but visible cottage cheese coating the outer labia. It would make sense, in that culture of super- cleanliness- to do something, anything, about it. It’s why so much of literature before cheap, wide-spread soap and clean water focussed on the ickiness of women- it was observable, not emotional. There are documents about women at the time of death having streaks of blood down their legs- menstrual pads weren’t common, either.

Why do you think women’s dresses spent so much time getting bleached, and women wore flowers? It was hope and love, as much as anything else. when soap and water and “feminine products” and anesthetics for birth, and c-sections and fistula reconstructions- research done in the southern usa, on slaves- all came together to give women health and hope of survival- that’s when their clothes changed to sporty and utilitarian. before that- the flowers? on their clothes? were half-way to coffin decorations, or prayers to female saints. names, too. if you’re going to live a long, healthy, individualistic life- you maybe don’t need mary on your speed dial, or rachel or leah.

so I’m not thrilled with female circumcision, but I can see the original point.

French wiki is even less reliable than the English one. Better get your numbers from more reliable sources – and try to compare attack rates rather than murder ones (indeed, dishonor ones characterize the intra-Mohammedan segment).

There are better motives for circumcision than religious motives. Circumcision makes for a healthier sex organ. It save the male from the Curse of Smegma later in his life. I think of circumcision as a perfection of the male organ. Why wait billions of years for nature to catch up when it can be done in a day by a mohel or qualified surgeon.

A circumcised penis is a cleaner penis. And a cleaner penis is a happier penis. Forever protected from the Curse of Smegma and a number of sexually transmitted diseases, not to say even that it is protected from cancer of the glans penis.

I feel sorry for the uncircumcised of the world. They do not know the benefits they are missing out on.

Religious circumcision is the practice of physically marking a child as a member of your faith. If this is acceptable, what are the limits of physical markings that can be applied to a child? The practice of female circumcision ranges from a small scarring of the clitoral hood to complete removal of all external features of the genitalia. Where in this scale does the parent move from an acceptable marking of their child to an unacceptable marking?

I think you’ve posed The Question quite succinctly. How much tolerance is owed to a culture foreign to ours? If excising the foreskin is allowable, is nicking the clitoral hood? How about removing the clitoral hood; a close analogy to male circumcision? Removing the clitoris and labia? Removal of the testicles? How about tattooing “The Mark of G_d” (Pick a god, any god.) on an infant’s forehead? That is arguably less medically invasive than cutting off body parts. How about tattooing “The Mark” on the left buttock?

There is no consensus on how much is enough. It all comes down to what offends our social aesthetic. I have no problem with that, but we ought to admit it up front; when in Rome, you will do as the Romans do.

Your comment is outrageous: there is extensive medical opinion in support of the benefits of circumcision, although there is not universal agreement. No responsible physician anywhere in the world (excluding a few Egyptian fanatics who hardly an be called responsible) defends so-called female circumcision, namely genital mutilation. To equate the two is stupid, and you, Mannie, should find a stupider board on which to post.

I don’t have to convince you. It’s cultural here in America. I don’t care if European males don’t get circumcised – but to Jewish males it’s cultural and has been for centuries – plus there is medical stats backing up the benefits.

No such medical stats can be produced to the health of females – on the contrary, there is a huge body of evidence on the ill-effects FGM has on women for the entirety of their lives.

Exactly. It’s a cultural practice, here, and little more. The medical benefits in the Civilized World are questionable and somewhat controversial. The same cannot be said in the Turd World, where the health benefits appear to be dramatic. But Germany is not a turd world country.

The procedure is done by Jews because it is an integral part of their religion, and for no other reason. Observant Jews will continue to have their boys circumcised.

Symbolic FG cutting is no more damaging, probably less, and just as culturally based. It is no more and no less medically relevant. But it’s their culture, so pee on ‘em.

I realise that this sounds like a simple question, but I’m yet to hear a good answer:

Q: Why is symbolic FGM bad, but male circumcision just a-ok?

Yes, one of them is part of our culture (it was certainly part of mine), and the other one isn’t … but that’s not terribly important to the kid.

And yes, I also realist that FGM can be horrific and excessive … but the outrage from a number of web sites (including this one, from memory) when doctors proposed a symbolic alternative is at odds with the reaction to this.

I agree that this is a fairly extreme restriction on jews, and I won’t be at all surprised if german governments do cartwheels to legislate some sort of loophole, workaround or exemption. It’s a problem for muslims too, but that won’t be why the exemption is found.

But it’s a perfectly rational ruling, and it sure puts the cat among the pigeons. SHOULD we still be cutting bits off children to satisfy a bronze-age religion? A few years back it seemed like there might be health benefits, but I think that’s been shown to be unfounded.

To be completely honest, I personally don’t have a strong view either way. As I said, it was part of my childhood. But it is a very odd thing to do, and quite similar to something that we all like to kick the other guy for doing. That’s just inconsistent.

The decent thing would be to leave it up to the Jews to eventually modify or annul this or any other Judaic practice. Goes well with Human Rights, self determination and various freedoms, right?
We’re supposed to be beyond external interference in matters determining faith, peoplehood, and such identity issues.

Does that same reasoning apply to muslims? Is your reaction to force marriage, female circumcision, burkas, mosques in downtown manhattan ALSO to just say “let them sort it out, it’s up to them”?

I’m specifically going after hypocrisy, in case that’s not obvious yet. The same crowd that would be throwing block parties if the government banned FGM is invoking nazism over this decision.

I’m circumcised. I believe all the men in my family have been. thinking back to those school-days swimming pool change rooms, my impression is that it was once the norm here in australia (or at least where I grew up). So to me it’s pretty much so normal that it’s barely worth thinking about.

It’s not until the practice is placed alongside female circumcision that it suddenly starts to seem a bit … odd. If a group came along that had a tradition of cutting off the earlobes of newborn males, would we be automatically supporting it?

I “get” that it’s an important tradition in judaism, and it’s a signifier of identity for a group that finds identity to be somewhat important.

So why don’t we all afford the same independence to africans and muslims who want to circumcise their daughters? Just how impartial is this support for religious freedom?

Anyhow, as I said, I expect that germany will find a way around this somehow. The tricky part is that they’ll have to explain why circumcision is OK, but “ritual nicking” isn’t.

I think the nub of your question is whether Judaism (and the Judeo-Christian tradition) is an anachronism (“a Bronze-Age religion”) or actually the beating heart of the West, and perhaps the proto-world culture. If the former, what do you identify or propose as the heart of our culture? Atheism, Science, Consumerism, Socialism, Obamaism …?

No, the nub of my question is – under what circumstances we should allow parents to chop bits of their children. The argument that we’ve been doing it for thousands of years isn’t automatically a winner.

I obviously don’t have a lot of time for religious doctrine. I understand tradition, but I don’t necessarily respect it.

Here’s your question, which you helpfully began w/caps to indicate that it’s the nub of your post: ”SHOULD we still be cutting bits off children to satisfy a bronze-age religion?”.

You are clearly asking whether society should permit the procedure of circumcision to satisfy (as you put it) the requirements of “a bronze-age religion”.

I made two points in response: 1. the centrality of Judaism (with its various rituals and traditions) as a foundation of Western culture and 2. a challenge for you to supply an alternate foundation.

Your answer would have to convincingly argue that, 1. The continued existence of Judaism is not important to Western civilization and 2. You have a better foundation for Western civilization (perhaps Obama-ism?).

“I agree that this is a fairly extreme restriction on jews, and I won’t be at all surprised if german governments do cartwheels to legislate some sort of loophole, workaround or exemption. It’s a problem for muslims too, but that won’t be why the exemption is found.”

Right, because da Jooooooos are *so* much more powerful than the poor Muslims!

“to satisfy a bronze-age religion”

Of course techno is completely unbiased here!

“To be completely honest, I personally don’t have a strong view either way”

“I don’t see how bias is relevant. I think we’re both biased. It’s easy to tell – I’m arguing one position, and you’re (sort of) arguing the opposite.”

I’m not surprised you snipped the part I quoted about bias – “Bronze Age religion”. This was an unmistakable slur on Judaism that has nothing to do with circumcision and now you’re trying to weasel out of it.

““I don’t see how bias is relevant. I think we’re both biased. It’s easy to tell – I’m arguing one position, and you’re (sort of) arguing the opposite.””

“I’m not surprised you snipped the part I quoted about bias – “Bronze Age religion”. This was an unmistakable slur on Judaism that has nothing to do with circumcision and now you’re trying to weasel out of it.”

Actually, I think I do have to ‘fess up to a possible mistake. Depending on where you are in the world, the 6th century (or so) BCE actually falls in the Iron Age. So “bronze age” might have been inaccurate. So I’d like to change my statement and say “iron age religion”, if that’s ok. I should have checked my dates.

No doubt you’ll say that’s also an “unmistakable slur” (wow, it doesn’t take much does it?), so I’ll address that now:

The scriptures that call for the circumcision of young boys were written between 450 and 550 BC. However judaism has evolved since (and I’ll wager it has), those commandments are still based on a reverence for stories written 2500 years ago. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that it’s the (only) justification for the practice under discussion – i.e. to satisfy an iron age religion. If there were no harm in it, or any questions of consent, then that still wouldn’t be a problem. But it seems that germany disagrees.

Before you pop an eyeball, it should be said that christianity is also an iron age religion (although it was also substantially rewritten in the early middle ages), islam … I’m not sure where that sits, but I guess it’s technically an early middle ages religion.

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t I read a few years ago about a pan-African campaign to circumcize males in the hopes of reducing the risk of HIV and other diseases that is widespread in Africa? Putting aside the religious commandment, does not circumcision reduce ovarian cancer in women?

With all due respect, Europe is Europe. They will never figure it out.

In America, we need to understand that there are no muslim issues with which we need to make common cause. America has always been the place where normal people go to be as free as they can be. The catch is, America was founded on the deepest Judeo-Christian principles. That is our identity. When we pretend that it isn’t, we wind up making common cause with people who use that expediency against us.

I am against circumcision but I’m not a Jew. I’m circumsized but my sons aren’t. If that’s what they want at 18, their choice, end of story.

I am a Christian who gladly makes common cause with Jews and with Israel. Judaism and Christianity and America are my identity. Common cause is a two way street, but islam is akin to the “oversized load” bearing down in one direction, taking up both sides of the highway. You’d better be going in the same direction or you’ll get run over.

Mr Goldman, as a young German I enjoy your articles of my country. But in this case I strongly disagree. You basically defend the irrational belief of people to interfere with the physical integrity of children. Let the people decide when they’re of full age. And somehow you manage to inject your column with Anti-Semitism reproaches.

Religious Freedom stops when you violate other people’s rights. With your argument one can make the case for the sharia and underage sex. And yes, it’ll mostly affects muslims. But I don’t care what religion they belong to as did the court. Religions don’t have a right of right of self-determination. Individuals have a right of right of self-determination and can choose to join that cult.

Yes, Parents can be cruel and brain wash their children and so on, but there’s a limit! The physical body is the property of a individual, the child, and not of the parents, the state, a tribe or whatever.

I will show you stories about the bad effects of circumcision, but then again those are not the arguments made for a constitutional state with the goal of protecting individuals. We could argue about this, but they have no meaning for the law.

Mr. Goldman, nice to communicate again with you. I would like to communicate some impressions of my 30+ years in the “Land der Denker und Dichter”, until one Adolf “fundamentally trasformed” (you will excuse my borrowing the words from our Leader) the “Land” into a murderous pervesion of the best in German culture. I have written about G. E. Lessing’s theology and remember reading the letters between Lessing and Moses Mendelsohn (among other things, a substantial philosopher of the “Aufklärung”). Lessing’s FRIEND was the same Mendelsohn, whose reaction to his masterpiece Kant wanted so intently to receive. (Alas, Mendelsohn died too soon for a worthy response). I have a vol. of Mendelssohn’s philosophical works and find them very sharp and rational (though outdated by the Kantian revolution). I have always seen this very sincere friendship between an outstanding German and an outstanding Jew in Germany’s 18th Century to be a harbinger of “good” things to come. (I note that Moses’s grandson of the same last name was able to make Beethovens’s music acceptable to Goethe.) There were Jewish soldiers in the Kaiser’s army, many earning medals. A goodly number of German Jews were so socialized in German culture that many changed or alter names, forgot their Jewishness. (This trap was avoided by the Zionist movement.) Things were looking positive. Then, Adolf! What does this little tale have to do with Germans of today and Jews in the opinion of said Germans?

I sit here writing, yet feeling great consternation. The Günter Grass anti-Israel diatribe against Israel(naturally not against Jews, as probably Grass has a few Jewish friends, ha!, just against the gov.) took me by surprise. What surprised me most, however, was the more or less acceptance of Grass’s theses by many, naturally after one had criticized its poetic vulgarity. But, I would be careful about subsuming “Germans” per se under some sort of significant anti-Semitism. (I know some Germans who want to throw the Muslims out, not Jews.) There has not been a day (or night) during endless months that I have not seen documentaries in German tv on the Nazi period. Such documentaries are concerned with more than the death camps. I find it important to find out all I can about the various facets of the Nazie terror regime. Indeed, my sensibilites for the often precarious situation of Jews have been tuned by German tv. I compliment the German powers to be for the constant reminder of the horrors of the Nazies. (I do note that my frequent visits to Russia have impressed me with how little historical enlightenment is thrown upon the Stalin period.) What I will now do is to focus upon three “prejudices” (in the Burkean sense) underlying contemporary German society.

1) Since WW II a underlying pacificism permeates German society (ascertainable by questionaires). Years ago I bet myself that Germans would turn on Israel for the same reason critique was/is directed at America. America carried the burden of military responsiblity during the Cold and not so Cold War. And that means “Krieg”, viz., war to one degree or another. And military action means killing. Only his horrified moral conscience could bring Foreign Minister Fisher to favor military action during the Bosian crisis. Since then, never again. Any time America has taken positive military steps to protect American (and European) interests, e.g., the Pershing Missle in Germany, negative reaction by the public was open, loud and, at times, boardering on violence. (Heck, the Germans did not even participate in Obama’s “kinentic military action” against Gadafi.) A quick comparison: Grass, despite or, perhaps, because of his involvement in the SS, has from the beginning of his career taken a position against “Nazism” and the correlative show of force per se, including on the part of America. It does not surprise me that he reacts so with Israel (not, of course, against Jews!). I have even heard some leftist Jews on tv lambast the Israelis. So prjudgic #1.

2) When it comes to circumcision I think many Germans are “nuts”. I suspect that feelings generated by the documentaries on female circumcision are carried over per se. But, worse: I have heard women, usually of feministic persuasion, go wild denigrating circumcision. Yes, it even means diminishing sexual desire. (My second son was born here and, at the request of this American, circumcised by a very puzzled German doctor. To listen to my second son’s incessant bragging, his sexual exploits have not been diminished.) It is a Burkean “prejudice” that circumcision is unhealthy and means a physical maiming of the the circumcised, not to speak of in someway curtailing sex (and if there is one thing that permeates the Germans of today, is good and healthy sex! Sex! And more Sex!)

I have briefly noted two Burkean prejudices that I find in German society. I in no way claim any scientific research on the matter. What is also clear is that (seen in the significantly reduced numbers in Church registrations) religion is waning (unless it gets some neo-gnostic twist ending in pansexualism). This secularization–notable during my 30+ years here– is Burkean prejudice #3. I fully agree with your concern about anti-Semitism. Given Germany’s past, that is a wise and prudent concern. (For the moment I retain my American passport, just in case.) I have mentioned three Burkean prejucies in order to show that there are other social factors in the current German mind that will place Germany on a collision course with Semitism or, simply put, with just plain Jewish life in its breath and depth, particularly as Judaism in the wide sense is seen as the Little America called Israel. We Americans repressed the people of Vietnam (sic!) and Jews, viz., Israelis are doing the same with the Palestianians. You know that story better than I.

I do not know if my comments have lightened your worries. My worry for the younger German generation is not so much anti-Semitism, as simple indifference to it all. (The Nazie documentaries do not enjoy enormous tv ratings.) Nevertheless, indifferentism, when out of place, can lead to not noticing evil. Well, that begins the circle again.

Indifferentism is the German and indeed the European disease, and it makes today’s Germans antiseptic and boring. What is it that people care about? My argument (which I took whole from Rosenzweig) is that everyone wants what the Jews have, namely, to be eternal in the flesh. If you are indifferent to mortality, you are indifferent to everything.
My older daughter observes that Wolf Parade’s song “I’ll Believe in Anything” is something of an anthem of her generation, with its chorus

but I’ll believe in anything
and you’ll believe in anything
…..
If I could take the fire out from the water
I’d share a life and you’d share a life
If I could take the fire out from the water
I’d take you where nobody knows you
And nobody gives a damn

What to people care for? Sex!!! There is an ad everynight on German tv. A man is getting up after evidently sex with a woman. She says something to Mark and he replies I am Günther. (I forget the exact names.) Sex without names, that is a seller. I refer to this ad as a very typical “icon” (please forgive the very unfriendly irony here) of German or, indeed, of modern culture. There are all kinds of Muslims living on my street. Whatever I might think about “Islam” (and it is not too much), I am just stunned by and admire the coherence and importance of the family. The slow dissolution of the family is a sad result of the pansexualism agumenting here. One German friend said to me: If you do not get a German woman in bed within two weeks, your are a flop. This is an overstatement, of course. But you asked what do people care for. Sex! On the other hand, Sex within the Covenant of Judaism or, I guess, within the New Covenant of Christianity is being sidelined for SEX “an sich” (to misuse Kant). The cultural result is as valid as yesterday’s orgasm! And if the nameless she gets pregnant, you abort the thing.

From freshman psychology through graduate work, psychologists are taught that sex is a primary reinforcer. Free-feeding at the primary trough reduces the conditioned aspects of other behaviors that were at some time in the past more subtle and precious such as love poetry, platonic love, parental love, love of life, love of nature, etc. One of my “behaviorally-oriented” professors spoke of people who had access to unlimited food, sex, and novelty as though they were biological preparations. They would, he predicted, do nothing much at all. They would spend their days without making any contributions or advances. So it seems to be. The Germans still need to work for a living, but maybe not the Greeks. And we can see how easy it is to adapt to welfare and we can predict with ease how countries will turn soggy if governments provide a guaranteed income.

Nazi-time or themed documentaries and talks induce guilt, rather than some lessons learned. Nothing productive can come out of it.
And it seems that responsibility, one of the productive things that should have been the result of the lessons, is not exactly characteristic of Germany’s (or Europe’s) younger generations – see declining parenthood wherever the state is not nanny enough. In total opposition with the Israeli situation.
But in Europe, lots of people feel the need to dictate to others how and where they should live, behave etc., assuming authority without an ounce of the responsibility that should come with it.
Any idea why and how come such attitudes are there?

Bern, the twilight is slowly sinking in upon Germany at this moment. Also, I feel, after having read some of the comments, that my mind has entered the twilight zone and that it is best to hope that the aliens do not see me. I see from my spelling, that it is getting too late for this elderly man. You ask a question at the end of your comment that deserves reflection upon my part. At least, before I should begin to pontificate. I only want to touch the presentation of documentaries on the Nazi period. I find such documentaries here in Germany as the last bulwark against forgetting.

15 or 20 years ago your thesis would be correct. Although high ranking officiers in the “Wehrmacht” (and Staufenberg was an outstanding example) opposed Hitler, the Wehrmacht itself cooperated enough, no too much, with the SS killer units. No doubt! Years back this fact provoked many older Germans, many ex-soldiers, to angry reaction. Guilt feelings were not appreciated. German tv makes no bones about it. The Nazies are not presented positively in anyway, shape for form. I knew some then young Germans years ago whose parents probably had been Nazies. Some were mentally disturbed. That is not right. In 2012, that group is thinning out. What counts now is the younger generation and the general public. Given the time distance between the Nazi period and, say, Germans 40 or younger (specially younger) that time seems so unreal. (Frankly I have at times unbelief that it could have been, till I remember.) Guilt is not a danger anymore, i.e., unless a documentary would suggest that Germans born after WW II are guilty. What needs to be done is to maintain a sense of responsiblity for the “sins of their GRANDfathers”. If memory is not refreshed, it will soon be erased. As a prof. and as a foreigner, I could probably get at films, reports, etc. of the Nazi period whereas most Germans could not. Fear of Hitler’s rhetorical power is great. Recent documentaries are probing deeper and I have a chance to listen more to Hitler’s perverse logic, but a logic it is. More and more I am getting to understand the thought processes in the Nazi mind. That is rewarding to me. I am also very pleased that “young” German historians are casting fresh light on the period. As I mention elsewhere, what I fear is indifferentism, the sublime ooze of forgetting. Germans should no more forget the Nazi time then we Americans should forget our instituionalization of slavery. Not guilt for the young, rather responsiblity. I see that responsiblity in Frau Merkel or Bendict XVI. They are old enough “to remember”. How are responsible German authorities to see to it that the young(er) Germans do not forget. If that happens, indifference will come up again, mixed with prjudices (and Easterm Germany was in no way de-nazified and is source for serious anti-Semitism in reunited Germany), and the cultural Burkean-like “pre-judging” could well leave Israel abannoned or neglected. I have not answered your question. I will reflect. Thank you for the comment.

The Jews are without question the most successful people the world has ever seen; during the 16th through 20th centuries the Jewish population growth rate was much higher than that of the countries in which we resided. Our health is the best in the world. In the United States and lots of other places, circumcision is considered beneficial to health. Yet you, you arrogant scoundrel, propose to suppress thousands of years of practice, and effectively ban the faith on which the West is founded, because some passing medical opinion in some place now thinks circumcision is a bad idea. Your presumption borders on the totalitarian. If medical opinion shifted to favoring circumcision, would you require if of all newborns? The idea that society can be ruled by whatever the “scientific” consensus happens to be at some particular moment is dangerous. What if the “scientific” consensus decides that people of a certain color are intellectually inferior? That is why society cannot do without the sacred, without principles that cannot be challenged by “scientific” fads. And the foundation of the sacred is the Covenant of Israel, which you propose to ban!

It seems the Hebrew population growth was perceived as a threat to Pharaoh, hence the decree to drown every Hebrew male newborn.
There might be some atavistic factor underlying the desire to eliminate the Jewishness of 21st century male newborns.
Perhaps some desire to re-found the world on a different basis too. It’s not solely a German distinctive feature, their Soviet allies had this ambition in common, and circumcision was not exactly encouraged.

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If medical opinion shifted to favoring circumcision, would you require if of all newborns …
_”__

Right now the practice of circumcision is a religious one and a pure suppression and power tool of the group (parents). It’ll remind you forever. That’s the whole purpose. In contrast the christian baptism doesn’t do any physical harm (splashing water on your face) and therefore it falls under religious freedom.

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I’m just an advocate of the separation of church and state. It might be “totalitarian” to suppressing parents. I couldn’t care less about their fantasies. If they abolish their religion I might believe them that they do it for medical reason.

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This is an insult to a lot of Israeli if cutting off the foreskin is supposed to be the common denominator. I admire their achievements in science, the integrity and honesty, their strong defense policy and the self-confidence. And yes, I’m ashamed of fellow Germans who saw them as scapegoats instead of examples. Back then and today.

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There will still be no reason for a law as there shouldn’t be CO2 Taxes and subsidies for renewable Energy, just because of scientific consensus.

The Covenant is both religious and national. Abraham was promised his numerous descendents would become a great nation. Jewish circumcision is an act of joining the Jewish people sharing the Covenant. This is a fundamental part of a male’s identity. It’s serious and irreversible.

As for parental prerogatives, one can also argue that parents should request permission (from whom?) to conceive and keep their child. Maybe they should ask the fetus if it wants to get born?

This comment is really not directed at Pual, rather a David Goldman. Mr. Goldman you have in “Paul” the 4th “prejudice” in Germany, and that is, “Wissenschft”. Of course the term is generally translated as “science”. But this is inadequate. As a professor of German literature (and later as a philosopher) I would receive in Germany the grandiose claim to “Wissenschaft” whereas the claim to being a “scientist of literature” rings hollow in English. So, what is my point? Prejudice #4 in Germany (but, alas, becoming so in America) is “scientism”, that is, the acceptance of what the “Wissenchaftler”, viz. “scientists” have to say as the last word. In other words, what lies beyond empirical investigation is subordinated to and devaluated by “Wissenschaft”. Alas, Paul is ignornat of the hot discussions and criticisms of “science” that took place in the 20th Century.
Scientism is characterized (to borrow a notion from Popper) by not being able to be falsified. The reason is that all falsification has be denied by the “prejudice” that canonizes “science”. I note I was circumcised as a baby and have never regretted it. A very good Lebanese American friend was, for health reasons, circumcised at 35. Both of us have not had our indiviudal worth diminished in any way. But note: If it is in principle wrong to circumcise a child because he has no choice, then it is equally wrong to baptize a child who has no ability to chose. Ergo: If circumcision is to be banned, then also child baptism. You wrote, Mr. Goldman: First they come for the Catholics, and then for the Jews–in both cases relative to freedom of conscience. Well, if they begin to attack the Jewish Covenant with its circumcision, they will come after the Catholicism for baptizing babies. Is not that so, Mr. Paul?

That’s exactly right: a fortiori, to give a child an intensive religious education (reading Chumash in Hebrew by age 8, Mishnah by 11, Talmud in Aramaic by 13) without that child’s assent might cause irreversible psychological damage! Scientific educators should design a non-damaging curriculum consisting entirely of mathematics and platitudes taken from all cultures, to go with school lunches consisting of lightly boiled organic roots and vegetables.

Science doesn’t enjoy the pristine reputation that it used to. There have been too many cases where the results are determined by whoever is funding the research. Kinda sad in a way but apparently everthing is corruptable.

Newborn babies do not have the ability for self determination. Thus there is no such right. The rights of babies hinges on the obligations of parents and society to protect them from harm. So we can fix a heart defect or vaccinate, indeed must do so, as an obligation under law, without informed consent from the individual because he cannot do that. Consent derives from the parent with oversight from the law.

In this case the medical benefits are clear. I have cited one peer reviewed meta analysis published in a very respected journal in support of that and could do that all day. There are cases of poorly performed procedures however the medical scientific evidence is clear that the procedure is far less risky in neonates than in adults. It is not possible to prove that overall this practice constitutes a net loss in health and well being later in life.

I have no problem if people weigh these things out and choose not to. However there is no compelling medical or psychological argument to be made for a legal ban. This is a cultural issue and nothing else. In this case a segment of German culture is imposing its legal muscle against a minority population because they can and for no good reason.

These comments dismissing the practice of religious circumcision, the oldest and most enduring of Jewish religious practices, as barbaric, uncivilized, and belonging to the bronze age reminds me of a quote by Benjamin Disraeli who was a Jewish Prime minister of England in the mid 1800s.

On hearing an antisemitic remark in the House of Commons he replied “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal
savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”

I found the quote from Prof. George very moving. I can’t help but wonder how a legal concept like the German law will fare when it gets applied to a muslim class insisting on female gential mutilation based on even shakier moral and religious bases.

Unless the law is specific to Jews and their religion, I’m betting it will not survive contact with a muslim population for whom simple, direct (and violent) confrontations are not a deterrent but a promise.

let me remind the gut-spawning moralist here that this was NOT a religiously motivated court decision.For a couple of decades western europe has been leaning more and more to a humanist approach where one of the few sacred guidelines to hold on to has been the integrity of the human.therefor you cannot force a irreversible fait a compli upon a numb child

This supposed concern for the “integrity” of the human being is hypocritical nonsense. If that were true, we would also ban vaccinations, as plenty of people would like to do — or we would at least cease to make them mandatory. The attack on circumcision is the latest in a long line of attempts to undermine family and tradition with some pseudo-scientific justification. We Jews do not need the advice of German courts on the rearing of healthy children! Ask yourself: Why now? And the answer is that respect for religion in Germany has declined, and rancor at the Jews, has risen to the point that a provincial court would dare to perpetrate this outrage.

hey, ya’ll. the foreskin goes off to paradise early. it’s a promise that the rest of the guy will follow, eventually. It’s a visible promise. It’s also a mitigation. it’s a fraction, rather than the whole enchilada and two sides coming off. That’s what the local populations would do, for their priests. So, some cutting on everyone sacralized the entire Hebrew population, rather than jus the priests of Egypt. or the mutilated catamites of female goddess devotees.

In case you were wondering, there were varieties of mutilation, with names. It was also done at different ages. We can cringe. Or- where there aren’t people dedicated to monotheistic principles—we have the ever so unnerving mutilations done by people seeking “transcendance” by body modification. If you haven’t noticed, it always seems to be a German lopping off his organs of generation when there’s an outbreak of cannibalism. This doesn’t seem to plague the Bulgarians, for instance. Or, some cult, usually with someone German ( or San Francisco City resident) in the lead. It’s a very culture- specific insanity.

The Jews were surrounded by people engaged in any number of practices that would turn our stomach. Somehow, God worked with our fathers in the Bible to build a sane, happy, healthy, world. We can see what they were up against any time we open an article by Zombie, for instance.

As for health- male circumcision has proven out. Female circumcision, by common medical agreement- was pretty site- specific. No soap, no clean water, no yeast control, no bactericidals, and frankly, bizarre vaginal suppositories(alligator waste). Women were consistently considered filthy, rotten messes by everyone but jewish writers. The ritual bath and waiting times after menstruation and childbirth probably contributed greatly to this physical difference.

And, well, marking their bodies, or marking their minds? Which lasts longer? My kids were baptized, and they’ve now spent their entire life in a church setting. Do you think that baptism of water is just water? or a baptism of the spirit? And, well, if they’ve memorized the Nicene Creed and the Lord’s Prayer and recited it weekly- sometimes daily- and assisted at worship, every step that they can- do you not think this molds them, too? The pastor is pretty up-front about confirmation shaping them for life- enough that he can release them into the world without much worry- they’ve been molded and shaped and somewhat annealed.

My sister- her week is marked by the sabbath calendar. and the yearly celebrations. and who knows what else? She’s different than me, even though we look similar. Her soul is being shaped in a different crucible. She’s lovely, as herself.

People who believe in science and the new man and marx are welcome to mark their children as they see fit: with dirt ( statistically, famously, less likely to bathe) with despair ( most likely to die of alcoholism or suicide) with divorce ( leftists divorce most often) with mal-nutrition ( holodomar). That’s rickets- that’s bones- that’s deeper than any skin-removal procedure, with remarkably unsavory sexually transmitted diseases (no waiting until marriage, no fidelity within, sky- high unboundaried sexual appetites)oh- deformed toes from wearing hooker heels, from dads that abandon their families. Cutting, hair-pulling, anorexia, bulimia, needle tracks….take your pick.

Everyone marks their kids. one way or another, everyone marks their kids.

OK. Then why do all of these anti-circumcision cases all seem to be brought against those doing it for religious reasons? I don’t recall a case where anyone ever brought the state into the matter where the practitioner was a Christian or an atheist, both groups engaging in it all over the world in great numbers.

Civilization — the notion that every individual has God-given rights — comes from the same revelation at Mt. Sinai that affirmed circumcision of newborn males. Repudiate Mt. Sinai, and you will have barbarism indeed. None of your science can demonstrate why we should not be cruel, nor (as Richard Rorty conceded) your philosophy. If individual rights are not sacred, they are not rights — and to assert a “right” to “defend” Jewish children against circumcision is to expel the sacred from society.

For some reason, I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis’ rejoinder to the anti-religion zealots who use the “Pie in the sky” argument to label us superstitious and backward. In “The Problem of Pain,” he counters that we hold on to faith not because of our pain and suffering, but *in spite* of it. I guess your reminder of Mt. Sinai brought home the point of why we’re here arguing this subject and for Whom we are arguing in the first place.

Revoking a 4000 year old heretofore broadly accepted religious practice/tradition cannot have been anything but the condemnation of a people. To call it a “health” or “children’s rights” issue can be nothing more than bigoted dissembling, nothing less than willful ignorance.

In a world where the (Christian) religious education of children is questioned by “children’s rights” advocates, infant circumcision is not a public health issue, it’s an issue of religious authority and who has it, and who doesn’t. Here in America, we’re about to find out the answer to that question as the Catholic Church faces down the challenge of Obamacare.

It is true: there is no true believe in Germany. At the moment we Germans believe in our seemingly superior economy. But that will end. After that there is hollowness.
To criticize religious practices is part of this. It could become dangerous but I don´t think so. It is only hollow. If you fight it a little bit the attacker changes
his preferences.

I don’t claim to understand why Germans are doing what they are doing but could the sympathy for the anti-circumcision ruling be more an anti-immigrant feeling than antisemitism?

If most of the Jews now living in Germany are Russian immigrants, that would suggest that Germany was largely Judenrein before the fall of the Soviet Union. Certainly Muslim immigrants provide plenty of reasons for most ordinary Germans who do not employ large numbers of low wage workers to wish them gone. If another group of immigrants, albeit a far less obnoxious group, is collateral damage that is less likely to cause upset than if there were still a large native Jewish population.

A few days ago, in exchange for a nearly full bottle of Mezcal de Tres Gusanos, I was shown a crumpled scrap of paper that fell off a wastepaper basket, which aside from the beer and pickled pot roast stains, it bore the seal of the Cologne Law Court and seemed to be, perhaps, a reply to Mr. Goldman’s column.

The single line reads, “Wer den Dichter will verstehen, Muss in Dichters Lande gehen.” Google’s translate yielded nonsense. However, I did ask an old man with a number tattooed in his arm. “Nu,” he said smiling, “it means, if you want to understand Heinrich Heine, visit Israel.” I stood in awe at his erudition and asked his name. “Bridegroom of Blood,” he replied.

It may have been a true story, but if I remember correctly, Isaac Bashevis Singer, told it best: In a WW2 SS roundup of Jews, a woman gives birth to a son. The mother asks the SS officer to give her his knife. He does, and she circumcises her son. Heaven and earth shake. Not far away from that woman, kneeling by a freshly dug pit, a Jew bares his ass and yells, “kish mir tuches,” at the machine gunner about to mow him down.

If the Cologne Law Courts thinks it can enforce their legislation, they’ll have to think about enforcers, and that’s a whole different ballgame.

To equate an anti-circumcision stance with anti-Semitism is unfair and actually evasive. I am a strong supporter of Israel and Jews but also a strong supporter of fully intact bodies – at least the bodies of babies and children, who expect to be PROTECTED by their parents, not assaulted and traumatized. To argue that it’s anti-Semitic to denounce circumcision is to deflect attention from the fact that you’re advocating for putting a knife to a child’s genitals.

Why is it child abuse to “circumcize” the skin off a child’s finger, but not off their penis or vagina? Note that inherent to the pro-circumcision argument is the idea that God made a mistake. God didn’t make a mistake. Sexually-anxious adults, Jew and non-Jew, Muslim and non-Muslim, make mistakes. The proof is in the litany of rationalizations invoked to justify the expression of such sadistic impulses!

“…you have provided a pretext for every Jew-hater in Germany to denounce a fundamental practice of our religion on the spurious pretext of child welfare…”

“SPURIOUS PRETEXT OF CHILD WELFARE”?!?! Think about what you are saying!! The simple truth is that it’s absolutely cruel to ritualistically cut into a child’s genitals. “Freedom of religion” should not include the freedom to alter a child’s anatomy any more than “freedom of speech” should include speech that is designed to eliminate the freedom of speech.

You are entitled to oppose circumcision. But by what authority does a court criminalize a 4,000 year old practice that is recognized and protected in every civilized land in the world? Is the authority medical opinion? That is divided down the middle. Is the authority the right of the newborn? The concept of individual rights was unknown until Mt. Sinai; the individual is sacred by virtue of being an image of the living God. And the Jewish people, the living bearer of the covenant of Mt. Sinai, has transmitted this through the ages — directly, in the case of the American Revolution, the source of the concept of inalienable rights in the modern world (see Eric Nelson, “The Hebrew Republic”). To defend a putative right by criminalizing the foundation of the covenant from which the concept of rights arose, and has been transmitted by the living people of the covenant through the ages — this is the most revolting perversion of logic and the most arrogant form of hypocrisy. The German language needs a term like the Yiddish word chutzpah, but without the connotation of moderation and sincerity.

Thanks for the response. And I agree that on one level this is more a question of whether a court has “the authority to criminalize a 4000 year old practice” than a question of the legitimacy of circumcision.

However, on another level, we cannot pretend that the value system that informs our opinions is independent of our opinions about authority – whether we are talking about circumcision or anything else. So the legitimacy of circumcision itself is indeed part of the question of the authority to criminalize it. Maybe the question I’m getting at is this: what mechanism do we have to help us see what parts of our value system – which we got from some parental or other authority figure, who in turn got it from some other parental or authority figure – were structured to conform to some bias or pathology on the part of the parental or authority figure who first shaped the value system? From that perspective, to argue that “the question of the legitimacy of circumcision is secondary to the authority of a court to criminalize it” is for me evasive – because it still comes down to the fact that you are advocating for ritualistically putting a knife to the sexual organs of a child who has no say in the matter.

Put another way, at what point does common sense fit into this debate? Again, you provide a good dose of intellectual rationalization for not criminalizing circumcision, but the fact remains: you are advocating for a life-long, organ-altering trauma that the child will have to consciously contend with once they realize they’ve been sexually betrayed by the most important person in their life.

You repeated the beautiful point that “the individual is sacred by virtue of being an image of the living God”. The living God must be uncircumcised because WE are born uncircumcised. By whose authority do we dare to “correct” the image of the living God? Talk about “the most revolting perversion of logic and the most arrogant form of hypocrisy”! I repeat my earlier point: how is it that ritualistically cutting off the end a child’s finger would be seen as unquestionably abusive, but cutting off the end of a child’s genitals is not? That “it is recognized and protected in every civilized land” is NOT good enough. Other barbaric practices have, through the centuries, been slowly recognized for the pathology that they are. At some point someone said, “isn’t it time to reconsider this” and slowly slowly people woke up. Maybe sometimes it takes a court to force the issue? Or maybe defending a “putative right” is NOT to criminalize “the foundation of the covenant from which the concept of rights arose”, but to recover that foundation?!

Parenthetically, I disagree with your point that circumcision has “sustained the healthiest and most successful people on earth for thousands of years”. Remember correlation does not equal causation. I’d personally argue it the other way around: consider how much healthier and MORE successful those people would be if they’d stop attacking their babies’ genitals! Instead, I’d look to what it is in Judaism that brings out the best in people through love, not trauma, and defend THOSE practices against criminalization.

So……you feel strongly about this. Fine – don’t have your sons circumcised. What you and the courts DON’T have the right to do is tell another parent what to do with their child – especially as it is NOT mutilating them, it is both their cultural and religious belief AND the medical data behind its health benefit is more on the side of those who use the practice.

That’s my point. The living God was born uncircumcised and had to GET circumcised. Isn’t that just a little convenient? Why wasn’t he born without foreskin in the first place? It’s just a rationalization for taking a knife to a baby’s genitals. My opinion.

You say all this, and the same court that had outlawed religious circumcision would tell you they agree with you, while likely sanctioning a complete penis-ectomy for child in the name of secular transgenderism.

“That’s all folks” as my favorite bunny used to say. No sooner had I shut off my computer to watch some German tv and, mein Gott, what did I tune into. A woman stood there, a bit sexy, only wearing a white doctor’s coat, beautiful legs and possibly no underwear. She wore a nurse’s cap with the words: “Lady-Bitch-Ray”. (Is “Ray” a new word in English?) I, being the masculine beast that I am, tried to peep until … Until the “broad” spoke. She criticized masculine porn, too primitive or something, and suggested instead lesbian directed sex videos. The show was dedicated to having good sex. Period! Thank God, no obligatory priest or pastor was there as the poor guy would have been chewed up as “not with it”. After 10 minutes I turned my tv off and sickened my way back to PJ Media. And here is the point of my tale of woe. I had just commented in context of some insightful comments by David Goldman on sex within the Covenant versus, well, sex, sex and more sex. The sexualization of Germany (which I take to be a panWestern tendency) just would not let me in peace. In an answer to Goldman’s question as to what people care for, I had answered “sex”. Not minutes later, “sex”, discussed with German “Gründlichkeit”, assaulted my tired eyes and my mind’s search of some peace. SEX! I, a 73 year old man, was to be informed what sex is all about. I am afraid that I must contend that “sex” is not anymore a fun sin as it was at my years of puberty, rather it has become a, if not, the way of finding fulfilment in much of the non-religious modern world (and even in the religious world, sex has entered with full force.) I would like to sign off this night sharing some pleasant thoughts, at least for me.

A few days ago I met a Russian Orthodox monk at the post office. We talked and I will visit him next Sunday and we will exchange thoughts about monastery life in Russia, particularly the monastery of Valaam (which I have visited). I do not think that the monk was highly educated, at least not in comparison with my 17 years of university studies in 4 countries. Wow, I have read alot. I suppose I know alot, alot of theory. The presence of that elderly, frail and simple monk revealed a wisdom to me that goes beyond mere learning. I felt humbled and uplifted at the sametime. That man is wise! I am not! I will finish my comments for tonight with a suggestion concerning where a reader might see and hear what I mean.

I confess my ignorance here. I do not know how much mysticism is a part of Judaism. I would like to know. It might be a “bridge” that connects us. A spiritual mysticism pertains to the heart of Orthodoxy, even more so than to Catholicism. If the reader of my (by tv) sorrowed words should find interest in seeing, hearing and experiencing what I mean, please turn to internet “Steps to the Skies”, Part 6 (there are 7 parts). The video introduces Russian monastic life on the atol of Valaam in the Lagoda Lake north of St. Petersburg. You will hear Russian with English subtitles along with a liturgy that speaks for me. About 4 or 5 minutes into the video Part 6 you will hear or, better, read the words that explain my peace. Thank you Mr Goldman for your article. Did you expect such a response?

Prof. Wessell, there is a rich Jewish mystical tradition, but it is viewed very differently by different branches. That is a very long discussion. Suffice to say that even the most “rationalistic” authority in modern Orthodoxy, R. Joseph Soloveitchik, draws on concepts from the Kabbalah (Jewish mystical writing), but with far less emphasis than Hassidic writers.

Maybe mysticism is a fundamental part of religion because you need some feeling in religious affairs. So you need some early initiating celebration into it connected to some personal excitement. (Too late for me). If you try it by a logical process you can´t call it a believe.

It’s much more complex (and interesting) than that. The idea of calculating with infinite series (the Calculus) stems from the “mystic” Nicholas of Cusa, whose influence on Leibniz is exhaustively documented; until Leibniz embraced the “actual infinity” excluded by Aristotle, only the “mystics” took interest in it. And Cusa’s interest in mathematics came mainly from religious examples. I’ve written a good deal about this, but unfortunately you have to subscribe to First Things to get hold of my major article on the subject. But this might interest you:http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/07/the-god-of-the-mathematicians

Wow! Mr. Goldman, I give up. Your erudition is amazing. I had the good fortune of having for my dissertation father in Spain one of the leading experts here in Europe on Nicholas of Cusa and who wrote certainly an important study in German. Recently the Journal of Sino-Christian Studies published an article of mine, namely “Definitions of Infinity: An Attempt to Gain Conceptual Clarity with Mathematical and Theological Ramifications”. I based my search for clarification on Cusa, at least as my Spanish professor has interpreted him, along with some reading on my own. I did seek to distinguish actual infinity from potential infinity (confusedly taken up into math by Cantor, efectively as Laserowitz contends, an “als ob” number) and to save actual infinity for basically theological purposes. I would enjoy reading anything you wrote.

Addressing Frank, I suggest that mysticism can be more rational than you think. A Russian theologian, Vladimir Lossky in a work in French on Orthodox theology, effectively tries to lead his readers to the thesis: God is incomprehensible and infinite. This is more than a mere theological blabbing, because it entails a conceptualization of infinity. And that is the rub. Josiah Royce, an American idealist, wrote an ontological proof of God in his “Conception of God”. Royce (an early support of Cantor in philosophy) begins with “omniscience” or actual infinity qua being known. The thrust of the argument is that there is no disagreement with Royce’s argument without self-contradiction. I hope one day to have the time to start with the conceptualization of actual infinity (no mean task) and repeat Royce’s argument. However, Frank, in the end the infinite is beyond the finitude of our minds. The central question for me consists less is specifying infinity, than understanding why we humans do not adequately comprehend it. Oh, well, such theoretical wanderings do not belong in “Comments”. I will note, nevertheless, that Simon Frank (your namesake) wrote a great deal about the problematic of the “not-fathomable”, which I see as essential to actual infinity. Frank was in the 1920`s in Russia a liberated Jew, then a Marxist, only to end up a first class philosopher in Russian Orthodoxy. No just “believing”, rather knowing why one believes is found in Frank. Oh, Frank along with other Russian philosophers was given a choice by Lenin: Either leave Russia or die. Frank left and somehow survived the Nazies.

I think, in the pews, without the benefit of a Philosophy degree, I think we make the distinction as “believing in G_d, vice having a relationship with G_d.” I wish for the sake of my soul that the latter followed naturally and effortlessly from the former.

I dispense with my title for the moment. The use is out of place here, for the matter is too human, all too human. The court ruling on circumcision and what it must mean to German Jews (or Jewish citizens of Germany) has penetrated too deeply into me and I find it disturbing. I view Germany as my home away from home and I will probably die here. It was the home of my grandparents. But the discussion tonight has brought up the “Jewish Question” of the 1930′s and 40′s and the Nazi solution. I am 110% American, yet German DNA (or as the Nazies would say “Blut”) runs full steam in my veins. I have often asked myself a question: If I had been born in Germany and had undergone Nazi education, would I too have become a criminal. That horrifies me! The old dictum seems to hold for me, namely: “But for the Grace of God, there go I”. Is it so? I do not know. I sought an aesthetic, indeed, musical respite from the “Final Solultion”. I would like to suggest something of beauty, yet so absolutely tragic, that might, paradoxically, soothe the souls of many obviously bothered Jewish commentators, including Mr. Goldman himself. It helps me.

1) Please go to internet look up “Gorecki, Sympony No. 3 “Sorrowful Songs” lento e largo” with the soprano Isabel Bayradaraian. Gorecki is a Poliah composer, recently died, of unusual talents. His “Sorrowful Songs” was adopted for a film on the Holocaust. Please do remember that 3 million of the liquidated Jews were, after all, Polish. Gorecki has not forgotten that. Almost 2 million Non-Jewish Poles were liquidated along with ca. 500k slaves of different origins. This version of “Sorrowful Songs” is played for the first time by a Polish orchestra in Ausschwitz itself. That is moving beyond belief. Gorecki’s “Sorrowful Song” is aimed in this version at all who were murdered by the Nazies, though the Jews were #1.

2) If, as perverse as it sounds, i.e., when answered, one wishes to learn what materials the Nazies used to pave the pathways beteen the barracks, turn once again to “Henryk Górecki – III Symfonia (Symfonia Piesni Zalosnych …) 1. Not only the “sorrowful songs” is sung, but Goreski comments in Polish with English subtitles about what he, as a young Pole after WW II, experienced in (being forced) visiting Ausschwitz. (We are lucky that Stalin saw it as a propoganda tool or the camp might have been torn down.) Gorecki will give you the answer to the question posed above and the music aethetically transmit the horror–also film clips are interspersed–and Gorecki focuses upon the Jewish destruction. I find some solace in such sorrow sung in memory. I hope any Jewsih reader might do the same.

I don my prof. hat once again. During much of my career I was a prof. of German lit. Naturally Kafka had to be read. Duty calls! Kafka was a Jew in a Gemran world not always too friendly to Jews. He was German speaking in a world of Checks not always to friendly to German speakers. A doube whammy! Kafka is difficult. One colleague, a fan of Kafka, frankly admitted the he did not understand the writer. But, it was fun trying to do so. At the time I felt had had, perhaps, mastered a few very short stories by Kafka. The man faced some profound difficulties of life. What does this have to do with the music from Gorecki that I just recommended?

Turn again to the second selection suggested. In the clips shown about the murderous and cruelly murderous (mis)handling of Auschwitz inmates, all with the resonance of a Polish orchestra playing the “Sorrowful Songs”, the camera pans across some suitcases where upon Jewish names were stamped. The deceived Jews believed that they were being transported to “work camps”. One piece of luggage was that of a certain “Kafka from Prag.” It was not the author, though perhaps a relative. At any rate, to see a suitcase from Kafka from Prag highlights in purely personal way, one connected with my literary interests, that my confusing, mysterious and brilliant Kafka from Prag would have been there too. That is worse than any of the at times nightmarish worlds created in Kafka’s imagination.

Of course this is not new. The Greeks – like the German Court and San Francisco Jew-haters, considered circumcision a violation of the “sacred” body. The ban on circumcision was one of the main causes of the Maccabean revolt. From Wokipedia:

“Antiochus pursued a zealous Hellenizing policy. He made possession of the Torah a capital offense and burned the copies he could find.[6] He banned many traditional Jewish religious practices: Jewish sacrifice was forbidden, sabbaths and feasts were banned. Circumcision was outlawed, and mothers who circumcised their babies were killed along with their families.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maccabees

This is a fantastic point Wise Man: all the oh-so-”modern” secular humanists commenting vehemently against circumcision have merely rediscovered the ancient Pagan point of view — the body as a temple, oy!

The practice is morally reprehensible. If an adult wishes to get circumcised, then have at it. But we all know it’s wrong to forcibly cut off other people’s healthy body parts. It’s just ridiculous in its obviousness.

Doing a horrible thing in the name of religion doesn’t make it any less wrong. Nor can you cherry-pick those things from a religious text that you like, and discard those things you don’t — all the while claiming it to be the word of god. The fact that you have to turn a blind eye to so much, is probably a good sign that it shouldn’t be used as some kind of moral authority. If circumcision is fine, then so is genocide, raping a girl as long as you force her to marry you afterward, killing your children if they disobey you, and so on. Without the religious excuses, no one in their right mind would do that to a child.

Some claim a small medical benefit to the practice, but that still doesn’t justify forcing it on an unwilling child. Adults do sometimes get circumcisions, preemptive mastectomies, and the like. That’s up to them. Mutilating children is wrong. Period.

It is practiced routinely in the United States for non-religious reasons. Three quarters of Americans are circumcised, almost all as newborns, and almost all for medical rather than religious reasons. Between 30% and 60% of all men in the world are circumcised. Now you have decided that this routine and nearly universal practice is “morally reprehensible?” And you compare it to female genital mutilation? That is revolting hypocrisy. I am not asserting medical authority as a defense: I do not have to defend a practice protected by every civilized country in the world. I assert the absence of medical authority to ban the practice.

The girl was never forced to marry her rapist; the rapist was forced to marry her if she wanted him to. Of course, this law also applied in the case of consensual sex, and I’m inclined to believe that’s when it was most frequently used.

As for genocide, what’s your solution for dealing with a bunch of baby killers? The targets of the genocide were burning their children alive on a regular basis. Baby killers who were actively trying to corrupt your children, I might add.

The level of ignorance displayed in your post, JZ, is staggering! One hardly knows where to start. It’s not up to *us* to defend. It’s up to *you* to say why you (as the “state”) will trespass on a harmless religious practice. We’re not keeping antibiotics from a person with a bacterial infection — I mean, my G-d man, keep things in perspective!

Finally, the fact that you and others seem to be *so* hyped up against this, of all the *real* wrongs in the world (think abortion, if you really want to go all out to “protect the rights of a child!”), makes one ask why this is such a “special wrong” in your eyes?

“Some claim a small medical benefit to the practice, but that still doesn’t justify forcing it on an unwilling child. ….Mutilating children is wrong. Period.”

So, even if there is a medical benefit to a procedure, an “unwilling child” should not be compelled by his parents to go through with it? Does this apply to all surgical procedures (short of those needed to immediately save his life), or just the ones you disapprove of? What if your 13 year-old doesn’t want to go and get orthodonture?

You know about as much of the laws of the rebellious son (that law did not apply to daughters) as you do about circumscions. For one, it was not up to the parents (both had to be alive, by the way, in agreement, and able to see and hear); they had to go to the judges, who would determine whether the child had stolen the requisite amount of meat and wine and consumed it at a feast within a very short specified time frame — an almost impossible feat — , that these acts occurred during a very brief span between the onset and completion of puberty, and that the other very technical requirements had been met. Meeting these requirements was so unlikely that the Sages remarked that an execution for being a rebellious son had never occurred and never would, and that the laws of rebellious son were given solely to enable Israel to earn merit from studying them.

Furious foie gras producers believe the move was taken because of pressure from animal rights activists. They claim that the product, obtained by gavage – feeding birds large quantities of grain so that their livers swell to an abnormal size – is part of France’s heritage, a claim endorsed by French law since 2006.

Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Poland, Ireland, Italy, the UK, The Netherlands, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic have banned the production of foie gras but not its sale, as have Israel, Argentina and some US states.

The president of their national federation, Philippe Baron, believes that the move is a vegetarian plot.

“Today it is foie gras, tomorrow it will be something else, because in any case these people are against all animal products,” he says.

MarcH, the issue is not whether one should perform circumcision on behalf of a Bronze Age religion. We Jews do it; we do not ask others to do it. Given that 75% of American men are circumcised, the overwhelming majority for non-religious reasons, and between 30% and 60% of all men in the world are circumcised, on what basis does a provincial German judge get out of bed one morning and decide that it is a criminal activity?

David – It’s not me, but Techno @29 (and comments in response) who asked the question whether circumcision should be performed on behalf of (as s/he put it, “a bronze age religion”). My response was that Judaism is not a bronze age relic but central to Western culture. Thus neither Techno nor a German court, nor San Francisco community organizers have any moral standing to work to ban it.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that your argument in this blog-post thread has been that the action must be legal and moral just because a lot of people do it.

I don’t think Judaism played a particular big part in the consideration of the issue.

There are two main issues at play. One, the view that religious values do not trump the law. If according to a religion God wants men to stone women to death for being found alone with an unrelated man who they are not married to, society should not accept such a practise just because the followers of said religion believe it to be righteous. Two, if you look at the issue from the outside then it is self-explanatory why cutting off a part of a dude’s dick when he is an infant and unable to protest the matter or avoid the procedure might cause some offense.

Being both Jewish and American it is basically impossible for you to view it that way though. But it actually quite poignantly shows that the “West” really consists of a multitude of cultures which have grown over millennia and that the common core of Western civilisation isn’t as all-encompassing as some feel.

I think we also come to the issue of universalism vs particularism. You seem to believe that your own attitudes and views should be regarded as universal. I think that every culture produces its own cultures and views and it is their right to defend these things against outside interference. But then I am someone who does not care what Muslims do to their women in Muslim countries just as I don’t really care how Sri Lanka handles ethnic issues. And if Germans don’t want babies to be circumcised without medical necessity, then that is fair enough, if Americans and Jews view such circumcisions as essential they can engage in the practice in the United States and Israel with impunity. Europeans tend to get very uppity with America about things like the death penalty, the lack of environmentalism, gun ownership etc. and most right-wing Americans rightfully reject such interference. Maybe one ought to follow one’s own advice and mind one’s own business.

Germany feels that its culture is now areligious, and guided by ‘science’, and David Goldman is saying that Germany may feel that, and pass laws that reflect that, but that those actions are a reflection of the fatal hollowness of modern German culture.

That they deny the source of Western civilization at their peril.

I will add that the worship of ‘science’ took Germany and its victims to a very bad place within living memory. Science is not necessarily objective, and has fashion and dogma just like other realms of human endeavor.

And what about abortion? What does that do to the child?

It amazes that most who are against circumcision are strongly pro abortion.

Religious values do not reign over the law. O.K.! At one point in German time it was the law to reveal where Jews were hiding from the police, known as the Gestapo. Many German citizens became law breakers by offering hiding places. Was this wrong? Of course not, though it was unlawful, formally speaking. Within the thinking of Catholic bishops, here and in Germany, such a unjustice contained formally in the so-called law abrogates the lawful obligation of the contents. In other words, an unjustice law is no law at all, specifically for those who see the it as such. Conscience demands disobedience. Think back into history. The Romans were polytheists and welcomed new “gods” into their clan of gods. Both in the case of Hebrews of that time and Christians a little later, adherents to the respective religions refused to obey paying homage to the divine status of the emperor. It got the Jews wiped out by the Romans leading to the diaspora and it got many a Christian martyred in the arena. Law is in general above religious practices. But, there are limits. Here is where relativism enters the fray and reveals its nihilistic nature. Well, Muslims want to circumcise young girls or want to stone accused adulteress to death. I am for the law over the practice in such cases–based upon a nonrelativistic moral theory. At this point, those responsible for the law must decide, not relativistically, the limits. A relativism would end either in accepting any and all religious practices or subduing, viz., subordinating ALL religious practices to the law. As a consequence, we believe and pratice our faith according to that which the state allows. And we are back to the freedom of religous conscience vs the state, which is the condition today in America.

The law as shaped by legislature by default has to be relativistic unless it simply chooses to impose the morals of the majority on the minority. Jews and Muslims aren’t the majority in Germany, over 90% of Germans aren’t Jewish or Muslim. So what is it then, shall the majority of Germans tolerate a practice they revile because they accept that Jews value it highly or shall they follow their earnest belief that it is wrong?

Your position and Mr. Goldman’s position suffers from the fact that it is entirely and unabashedly so driven by a singular perspective which claims the status of absolute truth for itself. As such you do not hesitate to impose those views on others when you find yourself in position to do so. But if Germans do the same, you cry foul. That in itself isn’t surprising, it is very understandable conduct which is to be expected from a dogmatic, but it is not a very good basis for discussion. We would simply have to say our positions are irreconcilable and we are thus foes. In general I can live with that, but of course we might be allies on other fronts and thus our inability to see each other’s points of view might prevent an otherwise possible alliance.

This exchange has been educational for me. Even I — who speak fluent German, who studied with first-rate Germanists, and have published extensively on German literature — even I did not quite appreciate the depravity that still corrupts your generation of Germans, and I am grateful to you, MKH, for demonstrating to me the inadequacy of my previous thinking.

MKH, I hate to use what Leo Strauss called “reductio ad Hitlerum,” but your argument presumes a totalitarian spirit, that is, positive rather than negative law. The law should not forbid anything that cannot be proven to be harmful. It does not matter whether majority sentiment doesn’t like something; the purpose of the law is to protect minorities (the majority can protect itself). Your concept of law is the implementation of the Volksgeist. I am not claiming a special truth as a basis in law: I am saying that a court has no right to criminalize a practice that is universally accepted everywhere else in the world, has the support of a substantial body of medical opinion, and is rooted in thousands of years of tradition. The court solicited no scientific evidence, held no hearings, reviewed no medical studies: It simply issued a decree based on its own interpretation of popular will. Germany has been contaminated with this notion of law (the State as the expression of the essence of the people, etc.) since Eichhorn and von Savigny discovered the Volksgeist in the historical school of German law. All of the posters who defend this outrage, including you, fall back on the Volksgeist: this is German culture, this is common sense, this is how Germans think, therefore we have a right to embody this in criminal law. When the Volksgeist turns nasty, we know what happens. No Anglo-Saxon court would rule this way: the burden of proof would be on the State, and the hurdle for proof would be extremely high. The fact that circumcision is universally practiced would itself make prohibition effectively impossible. What you are in fact defending are the collectivist and statist tendencies in German history which made your country especially susceptible to Nazism. I am not saying that you are a Nazi, nor that the German judges are Nazis, but rather that you defend a reprehensible legal theory with pernicious collectivist undertones, and by doing so help the rest of understand why Germany had a special weakness in the face of Nazism.
And this bears on the question of collective guilt. My religion states that every man is responsible for his own sins; the sins of the fathers are not passed on to the sons. But the sons of criminals may have a proclivity towards crime. Suppose my father were a criminal; I can repudiate his crimes and strive to be an honest man, or I can say, “I revere my father and believe that what he did was in some way justified.” If I do not repudiate his crime, I share in that crime.
And in that respect, MKH, you share in the collective guilt of the Nazi period, by appealing in effect to the Volksgeist as a basis for law.

The burden of proof is on the court which has criminalized a universally-recognized practice. I don’t need to prove it’s medically advisable. I don’t care if it is or not. I’m commanded to do it by God. But a court has to prove why it should be treated as a crime.

I hope my post #32 makes clear my biases toward America, Jews, Israel, Europe and islam. In that spirit, what I glean from this discussion is that an immoveable object is in conflict with an irresistable force, or so it seems. But your commment #53 raises historical/philosophical questions.

For instance, America is(still!) exceptional to all which preceeded it. Realized from Judeo-Christian and, particularly, protestant origins, the human world in all of its existence had never seen its like. Is such a legacy measured from 1776? From 1620? From 10 or 20 thousand years ago? Are we on God’s side? America broke with much which was universally recognized as the status quo. Many believed we were in contempt of the natural order and, by extension, the will of God. Daily we are tested, and time will provide some answers.

So, rather than wrestling with an issue that may be irreconcilable, let me ask a question for which you may have an answer. Does anything in Jewish doctrine provide for the possibility that, down the road, Jewish males will not require circumcision? If the answer is “no,” I will mark this issue “resolved” and will probably never address it again as it relates to Jews.

America sees itself as exceptional; so did the protestant Dutch Republic in its Golden Age, the seventeenth century. After freeing itself from the Spanish Crown, Holland went on to dominate world trade, defeated England at sea, and accumulated wealth beyond imagining and overseas possessions galore. Dutch bankers called all the shots in the 1600s, and their merchant fleets dwarfed all others.

The similarities go on: the aristocracy played a small role in government, in which many powers were devolved to local jurisdictions. Holland had a “frontier”, the sea, which it reclaimed and tamed. The Dutch truly believed they were a blessed and chosen people, with a visibly higher level of prosperity than all the rest of Europe. When the decline came, it was relative; Holland is still a pleasant and prosperous place, with a GNP exceeding that of the entire Arab world. This may be America’s fate also. No calamitous fall like that of Rome, just a slow decline relative to other great powers.

Indeed, we create America and not the reverse.
If we continue to turn away from our greater legacy, it is probable that we should remain exceptional only as defined by our President, who considers America no more exceptional than any other country except in our minds.

We do not have to fall victim to an historical cycle unless we posit that outcome as an inevitability. America, at its best, is a secular realization of Judeo-Christian values, the government and people of which are the complement to those values. In short, they go together but remain differentiated. To offer a temporal tautology, we will be great only if we are great.

My question to David Goldman is premised on the fact that 237 years ago, the whole of human history had never seen the like of the U.S. That being the case, is it possible that the Judaic tradition offers guidance that, at some point, circumcision will no longer be as absolutely defining an action as it has historically always been? If the answer is “absolutely not,” I will consider the matter closed.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to both the high and the low. Some of the discussion took my breath away!
One never knows what topic, properly presented, will light a fire. Thanks to you and this board, dozens of avenues of exploration have opened up concerning personal identity, human freedom, the law, etc.

The real problem is the Jewish quest for world domination. There is a reason for the dramatic drop in German fertility, 1.3 per each fertile woman. That reason is the dildo. Should you go into any “sex” shop you will find a vast variety of dildos all of which are circumcised. It seems that the frauleins of Germany prefer these to actual male companionship. That ladies and gentlemen is the meanest turn in the Jewish quest for world domination. Germans can forgive us for Auschwitz; however, the can’t forgive us for masterbation. There is nothing meaner than a man “who ain’t gittin any.”

Hmmmm, I understand that the birth rate in France, among the ethnic French has also dropped dramatically. Can you give us some personal insight on this phenomena? Is circumcision practiced by the manufacturer of French dildos?

I’d advance the hypothesis that the Cologne judge, afraid of being accused of “Islamophobia”, lumped together all those who practice male circumcision under the fallaciously extended label of Child rights.
The same has been tried with “ritual slaughter”, un-differentiating between Kosher and Halal procedures and conditions.

Aside from being directly targeted and attacked by neo-Europeans, Jews in Europe are also paying a heavy price for the terror induced by Mohammedan violence.

This isn’t collateral damage to Jews as a result of a measure directed against Muslims. It’s an arrogant, presumptive expression of Godlessness, runaway rationalism emboldened to trample over thousands of years of tradition as well as globally-accepted standards in order to denigrate a “Bronze age religion” with “archaic” practices. The posts above from (mainly) Germans defending the decision express the national mood precisely.

Your explanation doesn’t exclude mine. In fact the two complement.
Of course God is absent from the courtroom and from the judge’s mind, hence the lumping of very different “archaic” customs, practices and traditions.
I wouldn’t dismiss the terror threat of both being ostracized by a society oriented towards the cult of Rights (Human, animal, Other) and targeted by Allah’s legions.

I’m not sure how representative of the zeitgeist are the posts defending the decision. Similar (even more virulent) ones were abundant on an Haaretz article on the subject.

Mr. Goldman: I do not know how else to communicate to you except by “Comments”. I have now read your article on “The God of Mathematics” in First Things. I did not know Gödel had considered an Anselmian approach to God. (By the way, although Anselm in the Proslogion does not use the term “infinitus” to refer to God, he does hold God to be “incircumscriptus”, which is just another metaphorical basis for infinity.) I will seek out Gödel here in a uni. library. However, I would like to suggest two onotological modifications which establish, in my judgment, divine BEING, the negation of which entails a logical contradiction.

1) What I see missing in the Gödel of your presentation is the moment of idealism, the type favored by Josiah Royce (who offers the only possible proof that I have read for the logical integrity of the Cantorian closing off of the infinite and, therefore, endless series of potential infinity into an actual infinity). Only in terms of actually infinite consciousness (= Royce’s conception of God) can I (or so I think) avoid difficulties you seem to be hinting at. From my standpoint, numbers ARE qua being present (= “prae-ens” or “being before”) to consciousness, actually infinite consciousness. I hope I have said something sensible with so few words. At any rate, a version of Royce’s ontological proof is to be found in his “The Conception of God”. I have published a more concise version of this proof for the Sino-Christian Studies and for a Spanish journal of phil. I realize that what I am now writing must remain vague, hopefully suggestive. We “Germanic” types are snobbistic in philosophy. (God may not have spoken German, just OHG, if I am to believe Otto I, ha!)

2) Here I will confuse you, though I think my position implies a “fundamental transformation” of ontological thinking relative to existence. My thrust here is derived from Emanuele Severino relative to “esse” and the impossibility of “non esse”. What do I mean? Even Anselm introduces “existence” into his orational proof. In order to startle you I hold: If God IS, God does NOT exist. Or: If God exist, God is NOT. Correlatively in mathematics, if actual infinity is, it does not exist and the reverse. I am clearly limiting “existence” talk to the realm of finitude. In doing so I am attempting to exclude the question of divine “existence” as being a false question. The problem is divine being qua infinite. Here I would, following Severino, deny any negation as possible or, better, as logically contradictory. It is obvious that an ontology of divine Being qua being infinite which excludes “existence” from the analysis must force a revision of the whole ontological understanding of the infinite, be it supposedly numerical (denied by Laserowitz) of divine (affirmed by Anselm).

I will conclude with a short definition of God. Many Scholastics have defined god as “Ens infinitum”. I find a derivative of this conceptualization even in Cantor or, at least, his followers. Only in the terms of “ens” can one talk of pluraity of “entia”. I suggest the following definition of God: Deus est “esse infinite”. One of the surprising correlatives is that I even deny the application of the number 1 (a category of finitude) to God, other than todistinguish God from gods. Actual infnity remains inevable — and ancient idea. Finitude is excluded from actual infinity, which is the lesson I have learned from Nicholas of Cusa.

I thank you for referencing your article. Your education and level of thinking simply amaze me. As one intellectual to another, you have realized an ideal, i.e., giving the second intellectual some new ideas.

The Cologne court’s decision is puzzling, but I think in this case the effect on Jews in Germany is incidental to the outcome. Cologne has been the scene of numerous pro-Israel and anti-mosque building protests in recent years. The judges may have wanted to needle the Muslims a bit because of all the trouble they are causing.
In a national context, this is the rule of “Gutmenschen” gone wild. Gutmensch is the German term for a (mostly) secular busybody who identifies with and supports causes like Palestinian rights, immigrant rights, recycling, antimilitarism etc. They are annoying, but they include a great swathe of German society. They desperately want to be moral, good people and think of themselves as caring individuals. But they are about as individually unique as ants, and just as predictable.
I really miss the “Burgerrepublik” of the 1960s and 1970s. It was boring as hell, but the churches played a major role in national life and the function of government was understood to be looking out for its citizens, not trying to provide support and comfort to every 3rd world savage that made it through the borders.

Do they want to protect the children before the head comes out of the womb or after it comes out of the womb? With a pair of scissors as in late term abortion or those so gentle 1st and 2nd trimester abortions?

Mr. Goldman, since it does not let me directly reply to your comment from 6.40 AM today, I shall do so this way.

I think you are making it very easy for yourself here. It is of course far from the case that infant circumcision for religious purposes was found to be illegal simply because Germans didn’t like it. It was found illegal by a German court because it was found in violation of a number of legal principles. The law would be quite harsh on parents who were to slice off a child’s earlobe as punishment and I trust that to be the case in the United States as well. Circumcision is very similar to that, except it is sanctioned by two world religions. However, that is unlikely to be of legal relevance in a location where those two religions are not followed by most people.

Of course it would be foolish to deny a social component to law or else laws wouldn’t differ so strongly from one territory to another. One certainly doesn’t have to believe in a “Volksgeist” to accept that the law will represent the “vox populi” to some extent. The legal landscape of Mississippi reflects the social and political landscape of the place just as the legal landscape of Massachusetts is representative of attitudes in that place. The fairly fluid British constitution which grants complete sovereignty to Parliament does not even have much in the way of safeguards to prevent the imposition of the majority’s whims, hence why both Attlee and Thatcher found it easy to fundamentally transform Britain based on simple Parliamentary victories. Germany on the other hand does actually have a codified constitution in place designed to keep the law within the framework of some larger principles.

So ironically Britain, the motherland of the Anglosphere, is set up in such a way that the view of the Commons can be made law almost unfiltered whereas Germany has a humanistically-inspired constitution which was almost specificially designed to keep German law from reflecting populist impulses.

I would, in fact, argue that America with its traditional culture of elected judges and jury trials is much closer to enacting an old Germanic form of tribal justice than the German system which doesn’t have much of a Common Law component and where bureaucrat judges decide solely based on the academic analysis of the law and the constitution.

There are many examples of laws in the U.S. which seem to be derived mostly from what the population finds disagreeable. There is a reason you are more likely to find “dry counties” in the Bible Belt than in California. Of course, the U.S. constitution and the Supreme Court can thwart such popular sentiment, see Roe vs Wade or Brown vs. Board of Education, but the pro-life movement nevertheless tries to use its popular muscle in socially conservative areas to implement laws which make it all but impossible to actually get an abortion in such areas.

Yet it is supposedly Germans who subscribe to the “Volksgeist” theory here because their interpretation of legal principles follows certain cultural tendencies? It is hard not to see a crude reflex in that. Whenever Germans do something an American finds disagreeable the Nazis are invoked. I wonder what the way out for Germans would be here, to simply accept all aspects of ancient Jewish law? Or just the ones currently deemed socially acceptable in the United States? It is simply undeniable that jurispudence and legal interpretation will always be influenced by the culture and world view dominant in a location, whether it’s Texas or Germany. The fact that those interpretations might very well be at odds with each other is a simple reflection of the multitude of cultural paradigms in this world.

Sorry, a democracy is supposed to protect minority rights.
The view you expose is not compatible with this democratic principle.

Furthermore, the decision under consideration seems to be a zealot unlearned bureaucrat’s view of what well-being is. Imposing such a view can hardly be considered as a sign of open mindedness and much less an application of the equality and freedom principles, inherent to any democratic system.

“It is of course far from the case that infant circumcision for religious purposes was found to be illegal simply because Germans didn’t like it. It was found illegal by a German court because it was found in violation of a number of legal principles.”

You really are doing your best to convince the rest of the world that Germans are a morally crippled rabble inclined to form dangerous mobs.

What legal principles? And when were they discovered? Since Roman times, Jews (with a brief interruption between 1939 and 1946) have lived in Germany and circumcised their infants, along with some non-Jews, just as 30% to 60% of the world’s males are circumcised. Nowhere in the world is circumcision regarded as Koerperverletzung. Yet on June 26, a German provincial court turned up for work one particular morning, and discovered that this constituted a violation of “legal principles” that had stood unoffended for decades and centuries! Why now? We all know why: the influence of the Catholic Church in Germany has collapsed. The Catholic Church cannot countenance a ban on infant circumcision, for Jesus himself was circumcised as an infant. Religion-hating troglodytes lurking in the shadows now feel emboldened to come out and assert their authority.
As Freud wrote (in Moses and Monotheism, 1938):
“We must not forget that all the peoples who now excel in the practice of antisemitism became Christians only in relatively recent times, sometimes forced to it by bloody compulsion. One might say they are all ‘badly christened;’ under the thin veneer of Christianity they have remained what their ancestors were, barbarically polytheistic. They have not yet overcome their grudge against the new religion which was forced on them, and they have projected it on to the source from which Christianity came to them. The facts that the Gospels tells a story which is enacted among Jews, and in truth treats only of Jews, has facilitated such a projection. The hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity, and it is not surprising that in the German National Socialist revolution this close connection of the two monotheistic religions finds such clear expression in the hostile treatment of both.”

Since I am not a Christian and in fact consider it a good thing that Christianity may never fully have set roots in this part of the world, I am afraid our views are simply irrenconcilable and there’s no point in further debate.

I could list numerous example of limits modern laws have set on religious practice which hitherto was considered sacrosanct, but it would be wasted since you would simply bring up something else about Nazis etc.

Again, you are confusing laws enacted by legislatures (e.g., on alcohol consumption) and court rulings. An American court simply could not rule that infant circumcision is a form of assault. An elected body or a referendum could enact such a law. If Germany’s “humanistic constitution” implies that infant circumcision is a crime, why did it take until 2012 for someone in Koeln — the one place that Germans don’t even drink real beer! — to notice this? This is a clown show (albeit an evil clown show). Nothing like this happened under the Nazis because the Catholic Church was too strong. All of this is simply a pretext to assert the authority of “science” (as determined not by hearings or evidence, but by the Volkgeist, like the old “Race Science” of the 1930s) against religion: In short, it is neo-paganism run amok. What is astonishing, MKH, is that the average reader of newspapers, Jew, Christian or atheist, in the democratic world will recognize you instantly for what you are: the petulant, powerless, spawn of Germany’s tragic proclivity towards evil.

Courts constantly interpret the law and your Supreme Court just declared a mandate’s penalty a tax with exceptional legal flexibility.

The case in question which prompted the Cologne court’s verdict led to medical complications for the circumcised boy, hence the court had to deliberate on the issue of what exactly a medically unnecessary maiming of an infant is. This court, for what it’s worth, was the second court to hear the case and merely confirmed a lower court’s verdict.

In spite of opposition to “legislating from the bench”, something that happens quite commonly across the “democratic world” anyway, the reality is that one can’t pass laws for every possible matter. Sometimes situations arise and existing statutes need to be applied to them. This court applied assault laws to this situation and one can be of a divided opinion with regards to that. I happen to agree with it but I can see why one might not. What is however just plain silly is the constant invoking of Nazis, evil, etc. etc. A sure sign of a one-track mind.

MKH, you have just presented a relativistic because relativizing argument for cultural diversity, all disguised in an absolutism relative to which you are blind. The Germans have “their” paradigm (a new fact that in the last 30 years in Germany has never popped up in my mind), and now, based on “their” paradigm, Germans have discovered in the abstraction of legality an implication of said Germanic paradigm, and proclaimed a court ruling contradicting, indeed, prohibiting the particularistic habits of Jews (and Catholics for that matter). This is the German paradign! Other countries have other paradigms. So, your normative conclusion is: What is the argument or why so upset? Jews should simply surrender to the rules of a “German” paradigm. (Implicitly you can say Jews have their paradigm in Israel.) You are totally oblivious to fact that your argumentation contains a univeralistic, viz., absolutistic presupposition, namely: the relativity of varying paradigms demand universally an acceptance of the implicit imperative derived from particularistic values of whatever gov.

A counter question: From what particularistic “part” of the world does your absolutizing judgment system stem from? In what “part” of the world can I find the country of “Universalism” (= free from particularistic paradigms)? Nowhere!!! That means that your paradigm-universalism is itself but another particularism of your little intellectual “part” of the world that you inhabit. Your “part” is, alas for you, open to the same paradigm relativism. It is your opinion, and that is all. Fine, your opinion is important, but it has no critical weight, viz., universal application elsewhere where other particularistic values reign. Particularistic paradigms in “part A” cannot be validly criticized by particularistic paradigms in “part B”. Your system of particularistic values rests, however, upon an absolute claim for universal validity or your particularism. You thereby undermine your argument. You also thereby contribute to the suppression of “the freedom of conscience” when followed in religous matters. You have discovered a parallel HHS Mandate for Germany.

While I’m at it, why this fascination with insisting only grown-ups can learn about and participate in religious anything?

Children get exposed to mathematics. They have to practice their math at homework- daily. They learn to read. They have library shelves devoted to kids books, sections of bookstores, they have picture books.

Writing and math are both marks of civilization and culture. When they are grown up, we expect people to be functional and even sophisticated.

Why would we expect even less from another, more profound, recognized part of civilization?

In Europe it’s now open season on Jews. Never mind that Jesus, raised and died a practicing Jew, had to have been circumcized as would those apostles raised Jewish. With the exception of the good professor from Princeton, where is European Church on this matter and anti-semitism in general? How little has changed. The followers of il Papa and Martin Luther were more than content to see the objects of their hatred cast into the furnace. Is this what it means to be Christian?

Stephane Hessel: a French icon.
Roland Dumas: a French icon.
The latter should be delighted to meet his mistress’ brother, Manaf Tlass, son of rabid anti-Semite Mustafa Tlass, the Syrian general that just defected from Assad’s regime to join the Parisian good life and networks set by his devoutly anti-Semitic sister.

what french icons? politicians ! they don’t represent the french opinion, just their own appreciation given the UN directives, anyways they aren’t my cup of tea, Israel can do whatever it wants so far it doesn’t try to interfer in our country, and tell us who we should or shouldn’t meet, we still are a sovereign country !

you aren’t imune from interferring into countries inner affairs, and from friendship with dictatures, do you want me to refresh your memory?

Not only must He have been circumcised, but the Gospel According to Luke records His circumcision and names His mohel, an old prophet named Simeon, who praised God that he could now die in peace, having seen the Messiah.

Europeans have an ancient history of following orders. It’s in their blood and cannot be extracted. If the King makes it so, serfs bow and scrape. Modern Europe is no different. The strict class structure remains and no man can be elected monarch. America was to be different. The American dream permitted the common man to make a buck. It was true for generations. In 2012, half of the country today are unwitting-Europeans. If liberty is attacked or an absurd doctrine proposed, they humph and move on. Liberals believe that their freedom is above reproach while others must submit. Their self-righteousness and self-worship is the free man’s greatest enemy. It’s an old scheme that guarantees results.

Some say that our nature is freedom, but in truth man’s nature is to be dominated. The Cologne order will spread and become policy. The people will allow it as everything else that’s come before. With the fading of American ideals, nothing stands in the way. Allowing Leftists and Democrats control of social policy bit us all. The silent majority stuck it to Western Civilization.

“Europeans have an ancient history of following orders. It’s in their blood and cannot be extracted. If the King makes it so, serfs bow and scrape. Modern Europe is no different. The strict class structure remains and no man can be elected monarch. America was to be different”

you don’t like to read true History do you?

it seems that there are many exemples when populations revolted

oh BTW, the Franks elected their kings, and still today we elect a Monarch, not always from the same political party, so Democraty is working in spite of your tastes and of your government conception

I’m well-aware of European history. It’s been chaotic since the fall of Rome. Only we Americans keep them from gutting one other. Europe is known for bloody, genocidal massacres. Imagine the world had Europe had their way? We wouldn’t be enjoying this fine afternoon debating their wanton bloodshed.

Nobles elect Kings. It’s no mystery. To claim Europe is the land of elected monarchs and liberating revolutions is absurd. Hitler’s edict applies to all men. But a basic understanding of history proves left wingers are the murderers. You know that. We all know it. I can name ten leftist dictators (including Hitler) who killed hundreds of millions. Far more than any religion or right-winger. No matter how loudly you protest, that will never change.

“It’s been chaotic since the fall of Rome. Only we Americans keep them from gutting one other. Europe is known for bloody, genocidal massacres. Imagine the world had Europe had their way? We wouldn’t be enjoying this fine afternoon debating their wanton bloodshed.”

oh yeah, you Americans are saints, your civil war was a model, and of course the Indians can’t revendique genocides, nor the French that were scapegoated after the Independance, if they didn’t adopt the still Brits rules, they were deported, in no better conditions than the WW2 deportations

“Nobles elect Kings. It’s no mystery.”

No, it was warriors, but the system got corrupted, like our nowadays “democraties” are.

“To claim Europe is the land of elected monarchs and liberating revolutions is absurd.”

and if there was no Europe enlighteneds, and help, no american revolution !

“Hitler’s edict applies to all men. But a basic understanding of history proves left wingers are the murderers.”

may-be, but Franco, Pinochet, the Argentinian junta, the greek colonels… the Ayatollahs…weren’t lefty

“You know that. We all know it. I can name ten leftist dictators (including Hitler) who killed hundreds of millions. Far more than any religion or right-winger. No matter how loudly you protest, that will never change”

the dictators have no party, in the twentest century they were lefties, wait and see for the 21th century…

It’s impossible being lectured by Europeans with no skin in the game. Europeans cannot protect themselves yet vote their nations into bankruptcy. This begins with the gutting of their militaries. Your defenseless countries rely on American stability which today (because of Leftists) is shaky. Europeans take their security for granted and vote for more, as in France. The once grand houses of Europe are filled with Marxist pigs. Whatever free ride you’re gaining off the system will dry up. Leftists are mankind’s villains and destroy rather than create – real men and hard workers rebuild. Leftists have gutted art, entertainment, public schools, universities and reason itself. Liberals worship personality over substance, i.e. Obama. If men like Hitler or Chavez rise, the liberal cheers and masters the goosestep. This is true in the 21st century and beyond.

Science in Germany is called Wissenschaft. Wissen is knowledge.
There are many Wissenschaftler in Germany. But I guess many of them have not much to do with knowledge but more with fashions or money, from scientific socialism over unnecessary knee operations to climate change. So it speaks something for religions instead of sciences.
Concerning the Volksgeist: I knew it from east Germany, was impressed after 1990 it was out in west Germany, we discovered the new freedom here, but may be it is back again. The law gets contaminated by majority decisions. Mrs. Merkel speaks of alternativeless decisions. I feel again living a bit more under socialist conditions.

Someone quoted a story about a concentration camp circumcision earlier. It’s not from Bashevis Singer, but from a Hassidic rabbi:

Each morning at dawn, the Germans would lead us out of the camp for a day of hard labor that ended only at nightfall. Each pair of workers was given a huge saw and expected to cut its quota of logs. Because of the horrendous conditions in the camp and the starvation rations on which we were supposed to subsist, most of us could barely stand on our feet. But we sawed away, knowing that our lives depended upon it; anyone collapsing on the job or failing to meet his daily quota was killed on the spot, G-d forbid.

One day, as I pulled and pushed the heavy saw with my partner, I was approached by a young woman from our work detail. The pallor of her face showed her to be in an extremely weak physical state. “Rebbe,” she whispered to me, “do you have a knife?”

I immediately understood her intention and felt the great responsibility that rested upon me. “My daughter,” I begged, concentrating all the love and conviction in my heart in the effort to dissuade her from her intended deed. “Do not take your own life. I know that your life is now a living hell, from which death seems a blessed release. But we must never lose hope. With G-d’s help, we will survive this ordeal and see better days.”

But the woman seemed oblivious to my words. “A knife,” she repeated. “I must have a knife. Now. Before it is too late.”

At that moment, one of the German guards noticed our whispered conversation and approached us. “What did she say to you?” He demanded of me.

We both froze. Conversing during work was a grave transgression. Many a camp inmate had been shot on the spot for far lesser crimes.

The woman was first to recover. “I asked him for a knife,” she said. To my horror, she then addressed her request to the guard: “Give me a knife!”

The German, too, guessed her intention, and a devilish smile flickered on his lips. Doubtless he had seen the bodies of those who, out of desperation, threw themselves during the night on the electrified fence that surrounded the camp; but this would be a novel sight for him. Still smiling, he reached into his pocket and handed her a small knife.

Taking the knife, she hurried back to her work station and bent over a small bundle of rags that she had placed on a log. Quickly unraveling the bundle, she took out a tiny infant. Before our astonished eyes, she swiftly and skillfully circumcised the week-old boy.

“Blessed are You, G-d our G-d, King of the Universe,” she recited in a clear voice, “Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to enter him into the covenant of Abraham our Father.”

Cradling the child in her arms, she soothed his cries. Then, she addressed the heavens: “Master of the Universe! Eight days ago you gave me a child. I know that neither I nor he will long survive in this accursed place. But now, when you take him back, you will receive him as a complete Jew.”

“Your knife,” she said, handing the holy object back to the German. “Thank you.”

Beautiful? Sorry, I look at it from the baby’s point of view: his last few minutes of life – a significant part of his whole life – before he’s gassed, to be spent in additional agony, for reasons of which he cannot have the slightest comprehension.

Fortunately for him, I think the story, which all its detail, is apocryphal. How would it get out, with all the major players but for the guard – who would not understand the woman’s speech – also murdered?

Mr. Goldman, you are wrong. Circumcision is a barbaric cruel procedure. Circumcision is and has been common as rite of passage or whatever in many societies but as far as I know only Jews do it to defenseless newborn. It is a painful procedure. The ancient Egyptians practiced it, for young men. The ancient Hebrews loathed and avoided anything that smacked of Egyptian practice, except, significantly, circumcision. Why? Because their leader, Moses, was circumcised. He was an Egyptian, or raised as an Egyptian, and as a matter of course was circumcised. So his followers had to be like him. They differed only that they committed the act on neonates. I don’t have much to admire the Germans for (I still limp from shrapnel wounds from German artillery) but I say bravo to their law banning an ugly, unnecessary, assault on defenseless male babies.

Read the current scholarship, eg, Prof Jon Levenson of Harvard. Infant circumcision embodied God’s protection of newborns in a world that universally and routinely murdered them. Your tale about Moses is nonsense.

where do ya’ll get the idea that banishing circumcision banishes barbarism?

I could link to the article in instapundit, where swedish men- not a particularly circumsized group of men- collect chlamydia as a badge of hotness?
Or the article in the NYTimes Magazine where a group of wealthy bachelor American doctors brag to each other about the many sexually transmitted diseases they’ve picked up from “hot chicks”- including going back for a second case of crabs? Or the “bareback” parties that some gay men attend, knowing full well that some participants have HIV? Or bareback swingers parties- which had debates about whether to use condoms, or not. I’m pretty sure that swabbing for specimens hurts. It hurt just reading a description of it, in a Tucker Max book my husband brought home.

Now, as for that little bit of skin….ya’ll are all getting really excited about having your block and tackle in one solid piece. You get that this is a really new development, at all? You can, with a little digging, find a recording of the last major castrati singer? This practice continued- not a jewish practice- up until our techonological era?

You get that the Greek rebellion was sparked by a Greek guy getting upset that his boy was about to be turned into a ‘third gender’ by the local Turkish grandee? We can read Byron’s despatches about this war?

The Hebrews settled in Canaan- famous for the mother- goddesses? One of the high points of the year was a festival where guys would get hopped up and lop off the whole thing? There are still perfectly good horror stories set in America, with this same set-up. I’ve got questions about Burning Man, since the one story I know of set there involves a guy with a mutilated organ, and major diseases as well. How authentic was this story? How common?

That Roman and early medieval Europe had names for all the different types of chopping? the meat and two veg? all gone, had its own name- and the name varied by age- young boys, boys, young men, men? Clipping parts had names, again by age? It’s in latin, and the translations translate it into French, as if that mitigated the impact. I haven’t read the Latin, but a really remarkable number of female performance artists cite this sort of stuff, when talking about their intellectual development.

Then just take situational blocking- it’s hard to use your equipment if you’re built into a wall- an eremite- or on Mount Athos- no girls, anywhere. Or confined. not just monasteries- we know people were born in prison, and likely lived and died there.

Add in, arranged marriages for land. Who’s got a happy penis when faced with a Hapsburg-jawed heiress? For one instance. Think of Charles- inflicted with beauty, when he desired character.

Or, say, a Prince Albert. He was a German prince with a modified body part. I have no idea what it is- every time someone tries to explain it to me, they reach for their pants zipper, and I turn away. I’ve already heard about the “marvelous spiritual high” of having hooks put through body parts, suspending, duct-tape, all the other inventions of “body modification.” Or- say- how when you get suspended, and your skin gets stretched out- when you get cut down, they have to pop the skin bubbles, and it sounds like rice krispies. That’s the sort of body modification people are willing to endure to reach out to some “transcendant” “spiritual” state. a nick? as an infant? THAT- THAT- is a walk in the park.

Or performance artists? The guy with some chronic disease who hammers his body on an anvil until blood spatters the camera screen? Somehow this is high modern art?

or, say, again, the German cannibals? That seem to show up every few years? Why do they always start with what goes in ones’ underwear? WHY????

or, say, that Heaven’s Gate cult? Why didn’t they lop off hands? or toes? Why’d they go for the money cut?

or even scientific sterilization. Homosexuality was considered deviant, and treated by varieties of castration. it’s still debated for rapists and child molesters. some of it is accomplished chemically- which rots out bones, entirely. There was an article in mother jones about mennonites caring for a child molester rendered entirely fragile by injections.

Since there are parallel articles about AIDS victims rendered blind, mute, fragile, dependent, and cared for by religious folks, I’m thinking maybe that religious folks have something worthwhile to say about the state of people’s organs. they sure seem to be the ones caring for the prodigals, even if the prodigals never come home.

this certainty that you’ll be perfectly angelic and wonderful and lust-filled and healthy and who knows what else, except for that tiny bit of skin? Really?

God spoke to Abraham and said, give me this mark – not give me your firstborn son, or give me all of it when you’re drunk and high- give me something so you can remember that we can talk- that’s a pretty good deal. We don’t seem to manage quite well without it. Men seem to get desperate and kind of insane without it.

I am disturbed by your apparent eagerness to accuse opponents of infant circumcision of anti-Semitism and other forms of bad faith. This is simply a legitimate difference of opinion between, one the one hand, people who believe in the rights of infants not to have painful surgery performed on their genitals without anesthesia and, on the other hand, people who regard circumcision as a religious mandate and an essential part of cultural identity. One group values individual rights more highly while the other group values community and tradition more highly.

I would point out that the German court did not ban circumcision for consenting adults or for cases of genuine medical need. The court simply argued that a procedure that removes part of a child’s body and affects future sexual functioning should be made by the child when he is of age.

As for circumcision being a sign of God’s protection, well…. There was no such sign for girls in Judaism. Did God not place *girls* under his protection.

Yes, Judaism suppressed infanticide in general, not only of male children, although only male children were circumcised. Figuratively circumcision offers the boy to God, and the infant thus belongs to God and becomes a person who must not be harmed. It is one thing to oppose circumcision for whatever reason, and another to arbitrarily ban it by court decree while it is legal (and often recommended) everywhere in the world: No hearings, no research, no medical evidence, simply the transformation of an opinion into law, which is then justified by an outpouring of popular sentiment — the horrible Volksgeist whose appearance in German history always has been catastrophic. Let me remind you, though, that without the Torah and the Covenant, you never would have heard of the rights of anyone, much less the rights of newborns. Aristotle insisted on exposing defective or feeble infants. Peter Singer at Princeton argues today that a healthy pig has more right to live than a deformed human. To propose to ban circumcision in the name of “rights” has no possible authority other than opinion: it proposes to replace tradition and faith, the foundations of society, with the arbitrary and capricious opinion of self-appointed experts. So, yes, it is anti-Semitic, although it is not only anti-Semitic. It embodies the worst kind of evil ever to befall the world, the belief that self-appointed scientists can remake society by fiat according to whatever criteria might occur to them.

would you please get it through your thick european skulls that circumcision is getting off lightly? The Late Roman and Byzantine Empire ruled most of Europe, until the homosoon, homosion split in 1054 (?)

The usual configuration for a good family with land was that the oldest son inherited the land, and then faced an arranged marriage. Ask yourself how transcendantly happy that guy was, to be treated about like a breeding bull. The next son in line was castrated, and sent into the Imperial Service or the church. Sons after that- imperial service, landless warrior, church. Nobody was having much fun with their first best toy.

Have you considered the ravages of soldiers? Namely, diseases? lice, whores, venereal diseases that went through all the stages unto death? These show up in Shakespeare, as perfectly obvious and known. The German warriors, with skin rotted so that teeth showed through- in life, not death, mind you– wearing codpieces probably holding mercury onto their organs- were not enjoying their 100%. Consider all the philosophers whom syphilis demented. They very likely weren’t circumsized: do you think they enjoyed their wholeness to fullness?

Girls were required to do things like wear their veils so that only one eye looked out on the world. Charming? Can we talk about stereo- vision as a way of life? Then, they were married off to whomever. The fate of the imperial princesses usually makes one’s head hurts- shipped off to barbarian hinterlands, as Imperial diplomatic brides. Would you crawl in bed with a stinking, sotted Mongol? You’d be surprised how often they were sent, and told not to complain. Their brothers stayed home at the palace they’d grown up in, while the girls went off to become queens in foreign lands. They were truly steel in velvet. Barbarian, pagan, drunken, violent, illiterate tin-pot raiders. How happy do you think they were?

We get happy about French and English courtly love, b/c they carved out a life. The people who built this courtly style? Were in long- term arranged marriages, and were sighing about as much as an accountanting department clerk in Toledo, Ohio heavy-breathing over Fifty Shades of Knock-Off. They weren’t documenting. They were dreaming. The few, somewhat documented, were on the fringes of civilization, usually of an upstart bedding a noble girl- we don’t have her diary, so we don’t know what she thought of the whole thing. Probably- it’s good to live another day. The otherworldliness of the cathedrals was hope.

Not just Europe- the Imperial eunuchs in China lived long enough to have their indignities photographed.

There isn’t some infantile paradise of wholeness, health, unbridled sexuality, full sensual blooming anywhere, at any time, at all, in all of history.

And Lutherans practice infant baptism. Lutheranism is a state-sponsored religion in most of the northern countries. I don’t know that they could go after it, without upsetting their governments, kings, queens,and religious types. I think Anglicanism has infant baptism as well. That would be a big tree to pull up from the country. OTOH, who am I to say that the irreligious are not up to the task? Somehow, the people who believe notions that have killed millions of people still think of themselves as the people of good sense and sensitivity. One has to respect that about the way one respects cobras and rattlesnakes.

and, sigh. bronze age religion. we read bronze- age derived letters. we memorize bronze- age constellations, and their stories. people who don’t subscribe to the “bronze age” religion talked about here, likely read their horoscopes, bronze age technology, astronomy, and psychology in one convenient package. seriously: berkeley california has the highest subscription rate for horoscope magazines in the whole United States. We use egyptian and babylonian numbering conventions- 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 360 degrees, trigonometry…we study geometry, and probably use it more now than ever in video-games. We vote. One tribe in one city figured it out. Another tribe copied it. We’re watching a revival of one group of tribes religious festivals right now- it’s going on in London.

So, can we get rid of reading, writing, math, clocks, maps, chemistry, logic, history and the Olympics, just because they are old?

I know there is an easy joke about public schools trying to do just that, but still…..answer me. Can we get rid of the proven excellent things we humans have learned and created just because they are old?

May we close natural history museums- dinosaur bones are old. Can we blow up buddhas- because they are older than our current religion? Oh, wait, does that make scientism-types and fundamentalist muslims the same?

weaving is bronze-aged. tanning hides is bronze-aged. ribbons, bronze-aged. knitting is probably modern- if you mean 1000 AD is modern. Paper is bronze-age.Boats, again, old as humans. Domesticated dogs. using spices while cooking. ritual burials with toys. offering a drink to the dead.

so, I can have a modern rap video-the guy is wearing a knitted nylon shirt- so modern- with leather sneakers-those have to go- with gold chains- begone you bronze-aged junk- and over-size woven jeans- gots to go- and rapping about pouring some alcohol to remember his homies- oops- alcohol and pouring libations……you can’t get to modern without ancient.

Izzrdgrrl,
I am gobsmacked by the response to this thread. And I am taken back by the vehemence of the defenders of the German court’s position. But circumcision raises the most difficult issues: the roots of the sacred in the modern world.

As am I, but even more so by the facile assumption that this practise is so undefensible on its face that any argument for it is considered moronic, and anyone advocating one needs to be spoken down to like a child…….

They have the right to an opinion. Not only can they look at objective consequences vs spiritual purpose, but they may also assess spiritual purpose on its own, even in the face of objective benefits. Scientists hold the advantage in a democracy of being universalist instead of particularist. Any degree of tolerance for the particular is culturally determined, and made enforceable by courts.

Yes, I’ve always thought laws should be made like sausages in congress, but tricky moral issues are always de facto settled by judges, judges taken from the population.

Here’s something else to think about. Instead of holding mediocre humanity as a standard, why not look at the percentage of Cambridge graduates being circumcised? Or Tsinghua? Maybe even a backup school like Yale? What percentage of the world’s scientists are circumcised? Or, brutal dictators? Appealing to popularity here is a losing game, when you start to introduce merit into the equation.

Surprisingly, the rights of a five year old girl, when her ear lobes are being pierced, have not been debated here. Hopefully, those with merit will not attempt to sterilize our sensibilities. Protecting a child from injury seems like an instinctive parental responsibility but protecting a child from pain poses a dilemma, as pain often stems from simple physical exercise. Circumcision does not draw a line in the sand. It instead, kicks the can down road of an increasingly diluted society. Legislating away pain has no end and many irreversible consequences.

All this is interesting because emotional pain inflicted on children durning divorce has been relegated by the courts to an afterthought. We are fooling ourselves when we, as a society, pretend to put children’s well being first.

Mr Goldman, and the other articulate defenders of faith and circumcision:

Gobsmacking notwithstanding, I am heartened by the eloquence of your defense(s). I have copied many of these responses to my personal files for later reference, and I thank you all for instructing me on how to articulate the importance of this issue, and many others besides.

Although I try not to, I find myself amazed at the level of ignorance and the level of brazen ugliness (evil) in the world.

Those who are genuinely ignorant, but who are willing to listen to reason and engage in an honest debate, are the persons I try to persuade.

Sadly (dangerously), there are many who only pretend to reason. Their spirits are filled with ugliness and despair. They spout “values”, “freedom” and “rights” while having none and denying all for the rest. Sometimes they are hard (initially) to distinguish from the genuinely ignorant.

My feeling is that we are in a race with evil, to wake up the genuinely ignorant before the evil can push their gains past the turning point. I worry that the turning point is closer than we realize. In that struggle, you have better armed me for discussion with honest but misinformed people.

At the risk of adding one more comment, I offer the observations of Rabbi Paysach Krohn. Rabbi Krohn, in addition to being a well known Orthodox rabbi, lecturer and author, is a fifth generation mohel (performer of Jewish ritual circumcisions) and in this capacity is affiliated with numerous prestigious hospitals including Long Island Jewish Medical Center and North Shore University Hospital.

‘”If G-d wanted us circumcised, why didn’t He create us that way?” That compelling question was asked to the great Talmudic authority, Rabbi Akiva. He answered with a little illustration. “G-d wants us to have bread, yet bread and rolls don’t grow in the fields. G-d wants us to be clothed, yet suits and dresses don’t grow on sheep.” (See Medrash Tanchuma, Tazria 5 and Bereishis Rabbah 11:6) … G-d provides us with raw materials and it is up to man to perfect and enhance them. Food, clothes, and even our places of habitat are all commodities that we put together from what we are provided with by our generous Creator … Man, too, needs to be perfected. The act of ritual circumcision brings man to that perfection. The Torah itself uses the word ‘perfect’ in recording G-d’s command to Abraham that he circumcise himself. “Go before Me and become perfect,” (Bereishis/Genesis 17:1) is the way the topic of ritual circumcision is introduced … For Abraham the act of ritual circumcision was a conclusion – the attainment of perfection. He had lived his life dedicated to G-dGod and His Will. To later generations circumcision was a sign of the covenant that G-dGod made with Abraham reminding us to strive towards the perfection that Abraham reached. A boy who is not circumcised is lacking his essential spiritual connection to the Jewish people (http://www.brisquest.com/theritual.html )’.

I suppose that if one subscribes to a philosophy that man is naturally perfect and only needs to (as Joseph Campbell used to write) “follow your bliss” the Jewish belief that we must follow divine direction and make a sign to move towards perfection must be upsetting, especially when that sign suggests shaping and restricting our sexual nature in accordance with divine law.

Yes. God left the world imperfect in order to give man something to do as co-creator. That is where Heidegger went off the rails: the idea that scientific man is inauthentic. Of course, if you remove God from the universe, then you end up worshiping a dead universe.

I’ve never read Heidegger but have learned a bit about him from second hand sources, including some of your pieces. It seems that he was a bit of Nazi-groupie. I guess some of his intellectual descendants live on.

Regarding Jews as partners in creation, I would just add that, as I understand things, Judaism holds that our actions in the physical world, when done in accord with to Gd’s will, build our own souls along with the physical universe.

Kol hakavod for this piece and comments. It was an interesting Rorschach test.

- This court ruling was not a watershed moment. There have been many cases like it before, some going this way, some the other; some in Germany, some elsewhere.

- This court ruling does not henceforth apply universally, it was for this case only.

- It does not criminalize parents who have their sons circumcized, the target of the case was the doctor only.

- He was the target because a mother arrived at a hospital with the child profusely bleeding from a botched previous circumcision and in need of four subsequent surgeries.

- Since the mother could not sufficently communicate in the German language, the hospital staff initially understood (incorrectly) that this was a backroom-scissors-surgery administerd by an amateur. So they instituted legal proceedings against Unkonwn.

- The court ruled “not guilty” for malpractice because the doctor could a) prove that the initial circumcicion was performed along good medical standards and b) that he had the consent of the parents to perform the operation in the first place.

- Under German law, any surgical procedure is legally injury and indictable unless the doctor is able to produce three things: a) proof of qualification b) good work conforming to medical standards c1) medical necessity c2) consent of the patient (or, in the case of children, their parents)

- If you have c1, c2 is obligatory only when circumstances allow (the unconcious patient/emergency clause). If you don’t have c1, c2 is obligatory.

- He could provide a), b) and c2) but not c1), which is fine, and so he was aquitted. But c2) was a close call because strictly, it’s only valid for adults: A doctor can’t, for example, perform plastic breast surgery on a minor even with the parents’ agreement.

- In the case of beauty surgery, the doctor is expected to know this, because legal precedent is unanimous. In the case of circumcision, he is ineviatbly in a grey area, because precedent is mixed. So coming down on the side of tradition was safe for him, and he was aquitted.

- And yet the court felt that a more transparent legal framework was desireable, so the the grey area be removed by the legislature. For this to happen, they made the argument that this is an area of two basic right conflicting: right of parental supervision vs. right to bodily integrity. (Note that this is not a case about freedom of religion vs bodily integrity)

- by framing their argument this way, they moved the ball back to the legislature for future clarification.

Few will likely this in an older article see, but the lower house of the German parliament has today a resolution in favor of allowing circumcision passed (Thursday July 19).

There are several interesting discussions on PI-News.net, a German site that generally very supportive of Israel and Jewish life is. That a group of Germans that fervently support Jewish causes consider circumcision controversial is not a good sign. I’ve done my part in the comment section, using your argument to rail against the idiocy of “Volkswille” in a democracy.

PS: Have you read “Iron Kingdom” – the history of Prussia? Received it as a gift this week. It is a great read.

Taking the refuge of religion to justify barbarism is precisely inhuman and cowardice. All you proponents of infant male circumcision, you should be ashamed of yourself and I sincerely wish Jehovah God takes you to task for promoting your puny and deceitful ideas about humanity and religion. There’s been enough bloodshed in the name of religion, be it over the holy land, the Crusades and most recently the Jihad… Take heed of my warning all you imbeciles out there, promoting political,financial or other worldly interests in the name of religion whilst suppressing others basic human rights is the BIGGEST SIN in HIS EYES. If you truly believe in GOD then DON’T DARE QUESTION HIS CREATION. He’s perfected it, you’re NOBODY to justify addition of finishing touches. I dare any one of you, any given day, its an open challenge, which ONE of you has had conversations with GOD regarding the validity of Circumcision on non-consenting infant male babies!! One thing I’ve learned over the years is to TAKE ALL THE GOOD THE WORLD HAS TO OFFER AND SHUN THE REST (and regrettably circumcision is among the rest ). And the definition of good is innate in every one of us, our inner conscious knows it and the image of a bloodied (non consenting)infant penis is no way close to that definition. Period……